Ode on Shadow and Form
by Aris Merquoni
Summary: Being the adventures of a Shadowminion after he has perished, and the revelation of several grand conspiracies and many secrets of the universe. The plain text version on my website has the original, intact formatting.
1. Introduction and Act 1: Strophe

Ode on Shadow and Form by Aris Merquoni 

Disclaimer: Almost all places and characters herein were conceived by J. Michael Straczynski, Great Maker of all things Babylon 5, and were brought to my attention by dramatazations owned by Warner Brothers and Babylonian Productions, and also TNT. Additional books by Peter David, Kathryn M. Drennan, J. Gregory Keyes, and Jeanne Cavelos also contributed. And I stole a bunch of ideas from Fredrick Pohl and Stephen Baxter. And there are only seven plots in existence, meaning that I probably stole even more than I intended from Aeschylus, Euripides, Sophocles, Plato, William Shakespeare, and Tom Stoppard. Given all that, I am disclaiming any and all intent to profit by this misuse or this missive, I intend no offense or decrease in intellectual property value.

Thank yous: MASSIVE props to Shadur, Adi, and Patrick, for reading this over and over again in all its iterations and giving me tons of great advice. Thanks to Sarah and Gillian for being interested enough to hang out while I should be thesisworkingon and watching the show with me, again. And thank you Noah, my ex-boyfriend and now Professional Screenwriter With Own Blog (noahbrand. for offering me suggestions with this while we were still dating (and even after!)

Spoilers: As you might have guessed from the gigantic list above, I can't be responsible for the state of your knowledge about the Babylon 5 universe if you read this story before watching every single episode of Babylon 5 and Crusade, as well as all the TV movies, and reading all the books (Well, all right, not all the number books from the old days. But at least The Shadow Within and To Dream in the City of Sorrows, which have both been re-released with new cover art, and... yeah.)

So, uh, this took me about a year to write and a few months to polish into shape. It's long. Quite long. Novel-length, basically. It's filled with in-jokes and my own personal skew of things and a big universe filled with strange people and coincidences and quite a few references to other works of literature, none of which you should feel obligated to understand in order to enjoy the work. But one thing I would like to clarify in advance. An ode is a poetic form, originated by Pindar, in Greek, with three sections performed by a chorus. The first section was called a strophe and the chorus sung it while dancing a pattern. The second section was the antistrophe and the chorus would reverse their pattern of dance while singing it. The third section, the epode, was sung with the chorus standing still.

More recently, poets used the odic form to ask questions about life, the universe, human nature... questions similar to those asked by all philosophers and artists. These questions can't get answered in a poem. Or a fanfic. Or a philosophical screed like The Republic. And getting out of the cave to see the Good doesn't always mean you get a free pass on the answers.

So buckle up, here starts the ride...

(Aris, Feb 2006)

* * *

Act 1: Strophe. 2261. 

Centauri Prime had at one time been the toast of an empire, a glimmering jewel in the vast velvet firmament, surrounded by the comet-tails of proud capital ships bearing the purple-and-gold crest of a nation supreme. But the decay of easy success had started to grow, corroding the great empire from within. Its people settled for decadence instead of delight, entertainment instead of excellence, and pompousness instead of passion. Recently the empire had attempted to claw itself back to supremacy by launching its navies into battle again, but despite the help of its allies, its internal rot had been too strong to allow Centauri Prime to pull itself back onto its pedestal.

For the alien being roughly escorted to the throne room of the palace, the disappointment was something personal. He had been specifically selected as a representative to the Centauri from their allies, had broached the initial agreements, and had used every skill at his disposal to bring their leadership around to a complementary point of view. He'd cajoled, intimated, lied, and arranged everything from small-scale murder to the destruction of a major colony to bring the Centauri into the fold. He'd suffered personal indignities, a prison term without sentence or trial, and a nuclear warhead dropped on his back, and all, it seemed, for nothing. They were going to lose here, and lose badly.

It took him a few seconds to regain his balance and his dignity after he was manhandled into the throne room. "Ahhh, Mr. Morden," he was greeted, "I see they found you. Good, good. You're looking well. All healed now, I take it?"

Morden straightened himself and glared. Standing before him on the raised dias of the throne was Londo Mollari, the man he'd thought he could trust to hold up his end of a bargain. Or at least cling to ideals of a bright, shiny new Centauri Republic. "I'm fine," he spat. "What the hell is going on, Mollari?"

As if he didn't have any idea. As if his ever-present guide hadn't been hissing in his ear about the assassination of Emperor Cartagia and the incoming, infuriated Vorlon fleet for the last three days.

"A number of Vorlon ships are on their way here," Londo said, "Accompanied by one of their planet killers. They will arrive in a matter of hours. They have been wiping out any colony, world or outpost where your... 'associates' have influence."

Morden waited.

"Cartagia gave your associates the island of Celini as a base for their ships. Now that Cartagia is dead, I am ordering you to remove those ships. At once."

"There are three billion people here," Morden said. "The Vorlons would never attack a civilian population that big." He grinned. It hurt. "The ships stay."

For just a moment, he thought he'd gotten away with the bluff. Londo stared at him, expressionless, then raised a finger. "You're afraid, aren't you?"

Yes, everything was falling apart.

Mollari turned around and gestured into thin air. "_They're_ afraid," he said. No need to ask who he was referring to. He turned back to Morden. "And speaking of your associates, we need to be sure we can talk privately."

The guards stepped back. Morden watched them with a cold feeling growing at the base of his spine. Londo raised a hand, an earnest expression on his face. "Do not move."

Mollari gestured, and the guards on either side of the throne opened fire.

Morden flinched from the heat, but he wasn't the target. The whistling scream from his left let him know who was, and that the guards' aim had been good enough to take his companion out of the picture.

He could still feel the scream through the implant in his head as Londo stepped forward and surveyed the damage. "I will have to get that painted over, I suppose," the Centauri said.

"You're insane," Morden growled.

"On any other day, Mr. Morden, you would be wrong. Today, today is a very different day. One last time. Remove your ships!"

Morden thought, for one fleeting instant, that it might be nice to do just that. It would even be nice to have the power to give the order. But he didn't, so he drew himself up and said, "No. You don't frighten me, Mollari. If you try and attack our forces you'll lose."

"Yes, your ships are very impressive in the air, or in space," Londo agreed. "But at this moment they are on the ground."

"Right. They're on the ground." Morden raised a hand and snarled. "But they can sense an approaching ship miles away. So what're you going to do, Mollari, huh?" Another grin. "Blow up the island?"

It was the last moment when he thought he might maintain control, any control, over the situation on Centauri Prime. "Actually," Londo said, turning away, "Now that you mention it..."

He held up a small transmitter.

Morden knew what was going to happen when Londo pressed the button. He also knew what, personally, it was going to feel like.

"NO!" he screamed, frozen between leaping for the transmitter and running, and he heard/felt his voice break, and then heard/felt Londo press the transmit key, and then heard/felt the Shadows scream IN HIS MIND--

(here it comes)

--and there was an ice pick jabbing him in the brain through the spinal cord and out through his forehead, or at least that's what it felt like as the scream went on and on and on and finally died when the last Shadow on the planet was consumed by fire.

At that point, he wasn't really listening as Londo told him about the ultimate sacrifice required of Celini's populace. He was more concerned about his legs holding him up after what felt like being disemboweled with a rusty spoon as the pain drifted down from his head toward the vicinity of his navel.

"Take him to a cell. Keep him there," Londo ordered.

The guards tugged him backwards, and Morden realized they'd been keeping him standing. He struggled back to his feet and kicked out, but they were pretty good at dragging. He screamed threats, curses, anything he could think of, until they were out of sight of the throne room and the guards dumped him unceremoniously on the floor.

"Do you want us to keep carrying you, or will you walk?" one asked as he pointed his sidearm at Morden's head.

He scowled and got to his feet. "I'll walk."

He no longer had any delusions of getting off Centauri Prime alive. There had been something in Londo's eyes, something that said this whole affair was personal.

History and tradition were big in the Centauri Republic. The cells were very traditional, which meant they were small, cramped, and damp. One bench, a hole leading to the sewers in the corner, and a fair supply of mold. Morden sat on the bench, leaned back against the cold stone wall, and crossed his arms.

He didn't have too long to wait. The pain technician was ushered in after a few minutes. The man didn't look the part; a round, cheerful Centauri with a briefcase and an effusive smile. Even his eyes twinkled all too much under eyebrows like forgotten bird's nests.

"Well, we don't have all the leisure one wants for this sort of thing," the torturer said as he sat down next to Morden on the bench and opened his briefcase, "So we'll have to make do. Can I have your left wrist, please?"

Morden held out his left arm stiffly and ignored the sensations of a thin cuff being strapped around his wrist. "Oh, jolly good," the torturer said, or the Centauri equivalent. "Now your right, please."

Another wristband, and then a U-shaped device that fit around the back of his neck and rested on his shoulders. Centauri pain-givers, smaller, more efficient, and easier to transport than the Narn knockoffs. Of course, not many people knew about the Centauri technology, because anyone who was exposed to its effects was on the short list for execution.

"Oh, lovely," the torturer said when he'd finished fitting the last piece. "Now just a test, try and hold still..." he stood up and gestured with the transmitter.

Morden's wrists and neck began to feel warm, then hot, then painfully seared. He gritted his teeth and tried not to give away any indications of pain.

The torturer wasn't even watching him. He watched his instruments and nodded happily, eyes twinkling. "Wonderful. Everything seems to be in working order." The pain faded, faded, vanished. Morden rubbed at his wrists, which didn't help very much. "I don't suppose you'd care to make a formal apology to the Centauri Republic?"

"I'm sorry the Narns didn't get a chance to grind your collective skulls to powder," Morden said.

The torturer's face crumbled. "I wish you would at least be polite," he said as he pushed the button.

It wasn't quite as bad as being burned alive in a nuclear explosion. When Morden's vision cleared from grey, he was lying on the floor staring at the torturer's shoes. He slowly turned his head and looked up into the frowning Centauri face.

"Feeling more reciprocitory, Mr. Morden?"

"Go strangle yourself with your dicks," he croaked.

The next burst _was_ as bad as being burned alive in a nuclear explosion. Morden had long minutes to compare his present experience with his memories, so he was quite certain he wasn't exaggerating.

Then they hauled him to his feet and started hitting him, which was such a relief he asked them to keep going and they ended up breaking several of his ribs. He didn't have much time to complain about that, though, because after the torturer turned on the pain-givers for another shot, someone in official Palace livery was announcing his immediate execution.

They had to drag him to the chopping block, where they strapped his head down and adjusted a cutting laser to sweep across his exposed neck. His last sensation as the laser started to hum was not one of terror, but of overwhelming disappointment.

After that short, sharp shock, there was blackness.

By all rights, that should have been the end of it. He'd expected that to be the end of it. He'd saved his own skin on Z'Ha'dum, done a slew of things he'd be ashamed to tell his wife, made some errors of judgment, and been killed. Things should have ended there. He'd either stop existing, or go to some celestial registry to have a form of divine punishment bestowed upon him for his actions. He was ready for almost anything, up to and including a light bulb Jehovah condemning him to hell not for killing a planet-load of sentient beings, but for failing to accept Jesus in his heart.

He wasn't prepared for the blackness to go away and reveal the interior of a Morden-sized fishbowl.

At least, that's what the bubble felt like. To an extent, because he didn't have a physical form, and everything was dangerously metaphorical all of a sudden. He could... see, a sort of distorted image of the outside world, and if he concentrated he could make out details. He could hear, whispers and murmurs, mostly in languages he didn't recognize, occasionally in a dialect of Minbari he thought he knew. Other than that, he was alone with his thoughts, unable to close his eyes or shut out the outside world. Through a growing headache he desperately searched for information, straining at the limits of his bubble to see what was outside. Was he dead? Was he waiting for some sort of sorting to take place? Had he been ground up and used as mortar in the wall of the third temple? At this point he was willing to believe just about anything.

When he finally grasped what had happened, he reeled with the realization, then berated himself for not figuring it out sooner.

He was sitting in a Soul Hunter's collection, inside a collection sphere, in a 'library' of other collected people. He was on a shelf in a stone rotunda; he could faintly make out an imposing door across the way, more shelves lining the walls. There were uncountable soul spheres on those shelves, starlike points of orange in the dim, sourceless light, stretching up overhead until he could only see shadows.

There were worse places to be, he consoled himself after a while. He could be back on Z'Ha'dum. He could be back in his cell, being tortured. He could be actually dead.

He tried to think about legends he'd heard about Soul Hunters, which was all he had to go on. They captured souls... and didn't let them go. They claimed to talk with them.

Talk. That was an idea. He turned to his left and tried to make out the next sphere over.

"That was quick," the denizen of the other globe said, sounding surprised. "I was worried that you'd be out of it for months and I'd have nobody sane to talk to."

The sudden jarring presence left Morden a little shaken. He thought through a number of replies, rejected them, and said "Huh?" with as much conviction as he could muster.

"The Narn on the other side of me hasn't spoken in years. I think he's lost inside himself. And he just moved Jaddush, you see, the Drazi who used to be where you are now."

This was a little much to take. He pulled his concentration away, hoping that even if he couldn't close his eyes he could do something to help the headache.

"Oh, don't go!" the voice called. It echoed slightly in the space between them. Morden sighed and reached back; the person was bound to start making sense eventually, and it was better than staring at the other wall.

It took him some effort, but after a few tries he figured out the trick to seeing into the next sphere. Inside he saw a portly male Minbari, wearing fairly standard Religious caste robes. The Minbari smiled and waved. "Ah, good. Hello. A human!" He blinked. "I'm surprised to see you here. Last I heard we were still at war."

Morden rubbed his temples. He didn't know Adrenato, more than a few words, but the meaning was coming over in English. Unsettling. "And when was the last you heard?"

"Oh, when I died and came here. Our convoy was shot up by some retreating human fleet. I'm not exactly sure how long ago that was."

"Mmm." Morden thought about the unchanging view of the gallery and didn't comment. "Well, when I bought it, the war had been over for something like fifteen years."

"Incredible!" The Minbari started blinking altogether too rapidly. "And some of your species still exist? What tenacity!"

For a moment he couldn't figure out what the Minbari was talking about. Then he sighed. "We didn't lose."

That earned him a disdainful stare. "Preposterous."

"Well, they got you, didn't they?"

"That was a lucky shot. And I'm sure the humans who fired it were killed soon after."

Morden groaned and shook his head. "Look, uh... what's your name, anyway?"

The Minbari straightened himself up to his full height. "I am Kelonn of the 9th fane of Prashmael. Who are you, human, who presumes to tell me the entire fleet of Minbar could not deal with your species' unforgivable actions?"

"I'm Mr. Morden. I worked for the inhabitants of Z'Ha'dum."

Kelonn's eyes went wide, then his presence abruptly vanished. Morden chuckled to himself, then sighed. He was still stuck in the damn bubble, and he didn't have any more information than before.

Cautiously, he peered out the other side of his sphere. The bubble on his right was murky, dark. "Hello?" he asked. When he didn't get a response, he reached out and metaphorically tapped on the glass. "Hey? Anyone alive in there?" He paused. "Anyone dead in there?"

He waited. It took a long, boring period of studying his fingernails before he started hearing a response. There was a low moan, followed by a babble of words that he couldn't understand, and another long silence. He almost thought he was imagining things. He was about to give up and go back to pestering Kelonn when he heard a woman's voice ask, "Human?"

Well, there was only one real answer to that question, provided it was a request for identification. "Yes."

"Human..." the voice breathed in surprise. "Another..."

"My name's Morden," he offered. "Who are you?" He rolled his eyes as he realized what he'd said.

"Lieutenant Henrietta Greylark, United States Air Force," the woman snapped with surprising intensity. Morden blinked a couple times as she continued, "We got there first, we beat the Chinese out, damn straight we did. Launch worked, and the drive worked, and... and..." her voice faltered. "And the a...air was... I wa... th... the air was running... I was running out... I didn't... did..."

Henrietta didn't get much more coherent over the following span of subjective days. Morden waited, stretching thin his patience, as she stuttered out fragments of her life between long periods of dull moans and singsonging chants just loud enough to hear. If the dates she gave were correct her spaceship had launched over a hundred and fifty years ago, and she'd spent the years after her death here, staring at the unchanging room. She would sputter out a few facts, an opinion or two about politics centuries out of date, and then start sobbing again. Still, she was better conversation than Kelonn, who when Morden checked had shut himself up so tightly his sphere had turned black.

She'd been stuck in one of those incoherent moods for a very long time when she suddenly snapped, "Do you understand?"

"Huh?" Morden said, startled out of his reverie. He'd been wishing for coffee. He'd always liked coffee, but the prices had been prohibitive everywhere he went until he started working for the Shadows. Now, of course, he was no longer working for the Shadows, and dead besides. "Understand what?"

Henrietta sighed, frustrated. "How do you expect to bend space if you don't know where the mass is?"

He shrugged. "Mass is in matter. At least, that's what I learned in physics." He didn't mention that he'd flunked physics. "So you have to watch out for stars and planets, right?"

"No, no, no, no!" Henrietta's bubble swirled with angry colors. He hadn't yet been able to get a clear image from her. "That's only part of it. The smallest part. We're only the smallest part of the universe. Don't you know that? If you don't take dark matter into account, you're lost."

"Um," Morden said. "Dark matter?"

"It's there! It's all there! And here, and everywhere, and we're on it, and in it! We can't touch it, but we can sense it, there's too much mass, too much, and it's all around us!" She broke down sobbing. "And the air was going, I didn't know what to do, it was leaking out and I... the recycler I'd tried to patch it but everything was black, black..."

Morden backed away. She'd be reliving her death again and he really didn't want any part of that process. He'd resigned himself to another study of the floor when he heard Kelonn clear his throat.

He turned to his left. Kelonn was out of his self-imposed fugue, nervously rubbing his hands. "Ah... Mr. Morden..."

Morden raised his eyebrows and waited. Kelonn licked his lips, then said, "Ah, are you really the servant of... of the Shadows?"

"Well, I was, until I got my head cut off."

Kelonn frowned. "And so... were all humans working for the Great Enemy? Is that how you defeated us?"

The comment startled him into laughter. He realized Kelonn had been dwelling on his disparate remarks and had created a whole new conspiracy theory to torment himself with. He stopped laughing when he saw how quickly Kelonn crumbled. "No, not at all," he said. "And we didn't defeat you. The Gray Council called a halt to hostilities."

"Oh." Kelonn furrowed his brow. "Whatever for?"

"Well, the story I heard was they figured out that Minbari souls were being reincarnated in humans."

Kelonn completely stopped moving, staring with his mouth agape. Morden spread his hands. "So the war stopped. It had nothing to do with the Shadows."

The Minbari was still lost in surprise. "Our souls..."

"Mmm-hmm." Morden risked a glance at Henrietta. Still going on about her air supply. "Everybody knows Minbari don't kill Minbari. That one's right up there with 'Minbari don't lie.'"

"Minbari do _not_ lie," Kelonn snapped, though more reflexively than anything.

"Of course not." He didn't feel like arguing the point. He'd just spent however long he'd just spent coaxing Henrietta to tell him about anything, and gotten a lecture on physics, and now Kelonn wanted to argue about the war. All in all he wished he'd had a little more input on his choice of companions.

He was pulled out of his thoughts by Kelonn again. "So the humans were not working for the Great Enemy?"

"Not all of us, anyway. Just the people who decided it was a good idea to go digging on Z'Ha'dum."

"You decided to WHAT?"

Morden would have answered, and he would have even answered politely, but Henrietta said from his other side, "Photinos, Mr. Morden, photinos are important. Are you listening?"

"Hold on," he said to Kelonn, and turned back to Henrietta. "Photinos?"

"Yes. Photinos. Haven't you listened to anything I've said?"

"Only about dark matter."

"That's it." She seemed calmer now. He pressed to try and get an image of her, but saw only static. "Photinos are dark matter. They're the elementary particles."

"Oh." He risked a guess. "Like protons and neutrons?"

"Absolutely unlike," she snapped. "Those are baryons. We're all made up of baryons. Baryons and leptons... Light matter's all baryons, though, the mass, that's what it is, what we work with."

"Sorry."

Henrietta sighed. "The important thing is that we know where the clouds are."

Morden blinked. "I think you just lost me. Clouds?"

"Photino clouds!" She was raging again. "They were moving! Don't you understand? They were moving under me! They were looking at me!"

Morden backed away slowly. This was worse than her death fantasies. He wondered fleetingly if she'd had some encounters with his associates when she'd been on her trip; that might explain some of her story. Dark matter indeed.

"Are you quite finished?" Kelonn said irritably.

"For now, anyway." He looked askance at the Minbari. "I didn't know dead people were so chatty."

Kelonn shrugged. "I have not been dead that long, and I'm sure you've noticed there's little else to do except sit and think. Though I'm not sure we're actually experiencing the full flow of time. For instance, I don't believe I've felt the passage of a full fifteen years, though you say--"

"I don't need the metaphysics."

Kelonn's sour expression darkened. "I am only trying to be helpful. And what in Valen's name were you doing... 'digging around' on Z'Ha'dum?"

"Archaeology." Kelonn looked startled, but nodded slowly to show he understood, if not approved, the idea. "Our team was looking at the remains of the civilization there. We didn't know we'd be there when they woke up. When they did... we pretty much had to choose between working with them and being put into a ship."

He remembered that choice all too clearly. He remembered watching when Sheridan had chosen the other way...

_She is held by two of the servants, the ugly, blue humanoids, so she cannot run. The ship is before them, gaping open in a hungry yawn, a human-sized nook at the center of twisting black... surface. He watches as she struggles, as the servants turn her around and push her backwards into the opening, holding her. He twitches involuntarily as the black material wrinkles around her, slides over her arms and wraps tendrils around her forehead._

_He has to stand there watching as she starts screaming. At first her screams are animal cries of pain, and that's bad enough, but then she starts sobbing, "John... John..." her breath coming in gasps, the blackness almost completely engulfing her. The last thing he sees of her are her eyes, terrified, looking to him and past him as the ship closes around her._

_He feels an immense, stabbing pain, then, that has nothing to do with his body or the twisted bit of metal wrapped around his own brain. "Penthesileia," he mutters, and is glad when nobody asks him why. Then he leaves, and the ship sits, quiet as death..._

"Penthesileia?" Kelonn asked.

Morden started, then glared. "What the hell did you see?"

"Ahh... you are aware that the collection spheres in which we are contained are meant to facilitate the retrieval of memories and experiences of the--"

"What. Did. You. See?"

Kelonn coughed. "You watched a young human woman being absorbed into a vessel. Your own feelings were mixed, due to your friendship and yet your respect for her strong principles, which--"

Morden didn't want to listen any more. He reached out and pulled a curtain of static around the edge of the sphere, then sat down in the center and held his head. Or at least, that's how he thought of it. He'd just been reminded that everything here was dangerously metaphorical.

He hadn't thought about Anna Sheridan in a while. He remembered John Sheridan interrogating him about her, of course. He'd gone in knowing that he'd probably get drilled on the subject, which was the only reason he'd been able to keep his composure when he'd seen the picture. Good thing, too. Good thing...

He tried to meditate. It didn't work. He tried to figure out what Henrietta had been talking about. That didn't work, either. Finally, he decided to just confront Kelonn and get as much information as he could out of the damn Minbari. He didn't like being caught off guard.

He brought down the static to face a very bemused Minbari. "I've never seen anyone do that before," Kelonn said.

Morden frowned. "Do what?"

"What you just did, with the screening there. I've never seen that happen."

"Oh, come on," Morden said. "When I first said I worked for the Shadows, you clammed up and didn't come out for... for however long that was."

Kelonn shook his head. "No, that isn't the same thing at all. These globes are quite amazing. Even when the inhabitant is hiding, it's possible to get a glimpse of their memories, if one makes the mental effort. It's the only way I get anything out of Du'Nen, the Narn over there. With you..." He spread his hands in surrender.

"Hmm."

"How did you do it?"

He didn't know how he'd done it. He just had. He got the sinking feeling that the Shadows may have done more than just install new hardware in his head. They might have tinkered around with the existing software as well. And not just to update the drivers, either...

"Sorry," is what he ended up saying. "Trade secret."

And he was going to ask Kelonn more about how the spheres worked, and if he could gain any control over it, but something was tugging on his attention. He turned from his conversation to try and figure out what it was, but the tug had turned into a strong, steady pull, and before he realized what was going on he was spinning, spinning, and the sphere and everything around him disappeared. It was a very specific day in 2262. He was being directed to a purpose.

He knew more than he had a few moments ago. That was his first thought when the power that held him let go, though he was also filled with a sort of muted joy at having a physical form again, being able to breathe real, if recycled air, feeling the solid weight of his pendant and reveling in the touch of the world, running his hands through hair shorter than he'd had it in years, enjoying the rustle of newsprint as he scooped the copy of Universe Today off the table. He knew, with the same utter certainty he had about the Shadows being right, that he had a mission here, on Babylon 5, in these quarters, on this night of all nights.

At any other time he might have been more distrustful of being yanked around by forces he didn't have a name for, but at this point he wanted out of that sphere so badly that if the Shadows had shown up and asked him to march into Vorlon space wearing a sign that said "Shadowminion, please kill slowly" he'd have actually considered doing it.

He sat down without looking at the room's inhabitant and opened the paper. "Good evening, Ranger Lennier," he said.

The Anla'shok training was doing Lennier some good, anyway. The Minbari had the pike open and at Morden's throat bare seconds later. Well, at the newspaper, which was close enough for the purpose. Morden put down the paper, took in the confused and concerned expression on Lennier's face, and smiled.

"I know you," Lennier said after a moment of hesitation.

"I should hope so. When I was alive I was known as Mr. Morden."

That got a reaction. Lennier twisted his wrists so the tip of the pike flipped closer to Morden's throat. The threat made him grin. "It's always nice to be recognized."

"You worked for the Shadows," Lennier accused.

Well, at least he didn't have to break the news. And Lennier didn't seem ready to bash in his skull quite yet. "I did a lot of things, yes. Looking back on it, though, I think I just tried to make people happy." He focused back on Lennier. "Anyway, it's all just history now, and I've paid for all my crimes, eh?" He drew his finger across his throat. "Skkkkkkkk."

Lennier wavered in his balance a little. Morden grinned. Lennier didn't seem all that amused, though he backed off enough to stand and lower his pike to a guard position. "Why did you come back here?"

"I'm dead." Morden shrugged and pushed himself to his feet. "It's my job." At least for this night. He knew that. It wasn't important, though. It was Lennier who was the center of attention. He pretended indifference and asked, "Why'd you come back here?"

That wasn't a hard question, but he wasn't going to get a straight answer. He knew that already, knew a lot about Ranger Lennier that he hadn't known before he stepped into the room. Briefly, he wondered if this was normal.

"I came for wisdom," Lennier said, which was half-true at least.

"You don't come to the dead for wisdom, Lennier." He finally looked at the Minbari, who was making nervous passes with his pike. "My head was cut from my body. Even now it rots on a pole outside the Imperial Palace. Birds have taken the hair for their nests. Maggots ate my flesh. And you want wisdom?" Not that he was bitter at Londo Mollari. Not at all. Not until he'd get a chance to haunt the bastard until the end of his remaining life.

Lennier managed to meet his gaze. "Yes," he said quietly. "I do."

'He told me what he wants,' Morden thought giddily. 'That's a first, from a Minbari.'

It was all he could do to keep from grinning. "Wisdom," he said. He mentally ran down a list of everything that Lennier should know already, but was ignoring or oblivious to. "Let's see..."

The blindingly obvious one struck him as a good idea. "Delenn does not love you as you love her." He looked Lennier straight in the eyes. "And she never will."

"I know that," Lennier said bravely.

You could see it in his eyes, that he'd been denying it. That the gnawing had just needed a nudge to surface.

"No," he confirmed. "You don't. Not in your heart. That's the problem, y'see?" He leaned in confidentially. Lennier flinched. "No one should want to talk to the dead."

He reflected briefly that he might be projecting. He liked to think he was just being honest. Giving Lennier a warning, so to speak.

Lennier glared at him, and snapped his pike closed with undue force. "Go away."

"Oop, sorry, doesn't work like that. You raised a ghost, now you gotta listen to what he tells you."

"Really?"

Lennier started for the door. When it swung open, he regarded the shimmering boundary for only a moment before pressing forward and into the corridor.

Morden wanted to laugh. When Lennier had been collapsed on the floor outside for a few seconds, he walked out, grabbed the asphyxiating Anla'shok by his shoulders, and dragged him back inside.

When they were back in atmosphere he dumped Lennier on the ground. "Come on, you won't get there by walking," he said as he reflexively picked up the paper. "The other side of that corridor is over two hundred million light years away. And the air is spread a little thinly in the middle." Was that right? He'd been given lessons in this one Minbari, not astrophysics. It was impressive enough, anyway.

There was a kitchen counter he hadn't noticed earlier on the far wall, with what looked to be a functional coffee pot sitting on it. God, he could use some of that. He glanced at Lennier. "Think there's any coffee in this place?"

Lennier spent a few seconds hyperventilating before gasping, "Why did you help me?" He took another breath and continued, more steadily, "I know what kind of a man you were."

That was Lennier to the core, all right. No place for good old human compassion. Shame.

"Give a dog a bad name and you can hang him with it," he observed. He flipped open the cabinets, glanced at the empty shelves. "You shouldn't believe everything Sheridan tells you. Actually, I'm surprised he's not here tonight, since he died at Z'Ha'dum." There was nothing--_nothing_ in either cabinet. "Is there any coffee here or not?"

Lennier wasn't happy to be badgered about coffee in the midst of his breathing. Or at least that's what the glare he sent Morden suggested.

"Suit yourself," he said. He sat down where he could keep a watch on Lennier's reactions. He had work to do.

"So. You like being a ranger, Lennier?"

That got his attention, anyway.

"Would you like it any better if I were to tell _you_ that you will betray the Anla'shok?"

"You are lying," Lennier said, after the briefest hesitation.

"I wish I were."

"No?" Lennier turned to look at him. "Sheridan did not die at Z'Ha'dum. If you do not know the present how can you claim to know the future?"

Now that was interesting. Didn't Lennier know the truth of the matter? But challenging him wouldn't make him accept the warning. "I'm talking about the future--so what if I'm not up on recent history? I'm prophetic. Not infallible."

He smiled and picked up the Universe Today. If he wasn't going to get any coffee, he might as well get the news.

"I think you are neither," Lennier said. "But at least you have shown me there is truly life beyond death."

"Not necessarily," Morden said. He didn't know, and hadn't been told. If he thought about it, he might be frustrated. "But you'll find that out soon enough."

Let Lennier chew on that one for a while. The poor bastard was getting rattled. It showed in his eyes.

The Minbari bravely sat up straight in a meditation position. "I am Anla'shok," he declared, "and shall remain so until I pass beyond. I could no more betray the Anla'shok than my fingers could betray my hand. Our talk is done."

"Your loss," Morden said.

He studied the newspaper and waited. Lennier's breathing evened out as his training took over. Occasionally he looked up to check, but the ranger didn't move.

He toyed with the idea of asking, "Delenn?" just to get a rise out of him, but he controlled himself. He listened to Lennier's breathing and wondered for just how long he'd have to read Universe Today's predigested analysis.

It turned out that Lennier ignored him right up to the deadline. He was startled when he felt it; in fact, he was impressed with Lennier's repression of what must have been burning curiosity for so long.

He stood and folded the paper. "Well. Time's nearly up." He looked down at Lennier and smiled. "When you remember me, Lennier... think of me as a brief electromagnetic anomaly that told you some true things for your own good."

Lennier started to turn, but he was already gone. Gone, spinning back toward the collection globe, back to--

--no. NO!

He grabbed something and _pulled_ with all his strength. The universe crystallized, sharp, jagged edges of color/feeling/emotion/memory, and then he felt like he was sliding, sideways, down, away. For a moment, he thought he'd lost, and he was slipping back into the sphere, the cage. He flailed at the invisible forces surrounding him, then snapped into consciousness, in the collection chamber, most decidedly outside the ball of glass he'd been in the last time he'd seen that view.

He steadied himself with a few breaths and looked around. Now that he was outside the bubble he could see better how large the room was, plenty of room to stretch his arms out and not hit anything. It was impressive, especially since it seemed to be carved out of a solid pillar of rock. The points of light that were the soul spheres dwindled into the vertical distance far above his head.

Morden turned around and spotted an empty bubble--his. He smirked. Such a little thing. He wrapped his fingers around it, intending to keep a souvenir, but he couldn't get a grip. He watched his fingers sink through the glass, the cushion it rested on, the shelf... he snatched his hand back and shuddered slightly.

This was inconvenient. Also possibly dangerous. He didn't have any plans for what he was going to do now, but floating around like a ghost wasn't what he'd had in mind, haunting Mollari aside.

He stared down at his hand, eyeing the interference fringes where he could just see through the tips of his fingers. He thought about the time he'd screened his sphere from Kelonn, and what that meant about the Shadow technology he'd been wired up with. And about how he could remember what being alive felt like, and how somehow he could remember what all the parts of his DNA looked like (Had he ever _known_ what all the parts of his DNA were?) and how DNA was just carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, plus trace elements, and there were enough of those floating around in the air, so if he just decided to--

"I don't suppose you'd mind explaining just what you think you're doing."

Everything was grey and tasted like dust.

Morden blinked his eyes a couple times until he could focus. He was staring at someone's feet. For a few seconds that fact drifted around in his mind, unconnected to anything. After a few more blinks he realized it meant that he was on the ground.

He tried to talk, but when he forced air out of his lungs the only sound he could make was "Nnnh." His vocal cords hurt, he was surprised to feel. And, now that he was taking stock, he found that everything was hurting. His hair was hurting. He found that extremely clever, but laughing hurt, too, and got dust in his eyes, so he closed them and coughed.

"I'm not used to members of my collection taking it upon themselves to rematerialize in physical form. As far as my recollection goes, it has never before happened to me or to any of my brothers."

Morden tried moving one of his arms. He flailed for a little before he figured out he was lying on it. Too exhausted to be annoyed, he concentrated on his other arm, reached up and rubbed at his eyes. It felt good, even though it hurt like hell. He realized the Soul Hunter was talking to him, decided it wasn't important. He'd deal with it later.

"Are you even listening to me?"

"Mnngh," he said, which was slightly closer to speech than his first attempt. He reached out and grabbed one of the shelves, hauled himself up until he was slouched against the wall.

He stayed there for a few minutes, remembering how to breathe, as the pounding in his head slowly diminished and the aches in his joints seethed quietly. When he thought he'd regained control of his vision and his voice, he opened his eyes.

He'd had never met a Soul Hunter before. The hairless humanoid was wearing brown robes made from some kind of leather, and had a bony protrusion like a third eye in the center of his forehead. He stood with his arms crossed, staring down at Morden with a disapproving frown. "Well?" he said when he saw he had Morden's attention.

"Mmsrrwha..." Morden swallowed, ran his tongue over the inside of his mouth a few times, and tried again. "I'm sorry. What were you saying?"

His mind was turning over, slowly coming up to speed. He was surprised to find that he was back in the clothing he'd had before he'd died. His hair was back to its normal length, and his pendant was on its chain around his neck. He touched it for good luck.

"I am saying," the Soul Hunter said disapprovingly, "That this is most irregular."

"I'll bet," Morden said. He struggled to remember what had just happened that was so irregular. It had something to do with being dead.

"Our collections are meant to be permanent records of the best of the sentient beings of this universe. You are not supposed to get up and walk away."

Oh, yes. He'd decided to stay out of the collection sphere. No wonder the Soul Hunter was mad. And, he suddenly realized, frightened.

"I decided I didn't like the accommodations," Morden said, trying to keep his head steady. Was the headache something to do with having a head again? Or maybe he'd just cracked it on the floor when he'd... done whatever he'd done and passed out.

"You're not supposed to have a choice in the matter! We are preservers. We keep knowledge, dreams, memories. Being unable to capture certain important souls is bad enough. But what happens when you decide on your own to leave?"

Morden made up his mind. "I don't think... you'll have that problem with anyone else," he said as he struggled to his feet. He didn't know exactly what he was going to do, but he wasn't going to sit here and be lectured at.

The Soul Hunter watched him stand, then put a hand to his head and sighed. "This is a delicate situation. You are dead, you know."

"I figured that part out."

"And yet it would be an unspeakable crime to kill you in order to recapture your soul."

Morden took a couple of steps, supporting himself on the wall. A little shaky, getting better all the time. "Glad you feel that way."

The Soul Hunter went silent. Morden took the reprieve and continued pacing out the chamber. When he'd made it around to the doorway, the Soul Hunter said, "But if you die in the desert outside, I will make no special attempt to save your life."

"Just my soul, right?"

"Of course."

"Mmm." His sense of balance was settling in, and even though everything was still hurting and he felt like he'd mixed up the composition of blood with drain cleaner, he felt well enough to make a good show of walking away without collapsing. He spared the Soul Hunter a glance and crossed the chamber to his empty bubble.

"Ahhh..." the Soul Hunter said when he picked it up. Morden turned to look at him. "Those spheres are delicate, and do cost us to produce..."

"I'm sure you get a bulk discount," he said, and slipped the sphere into his pocket. After a moment of thought, he grabbed Kelonn and Henrietta's spheres and pocketed them, too.

"Now that is quite unacceptable!" The Soul Hunter started forward to restrain him. Morden looked up and glared, which brought the alien up short. He recovered and said, "I can understand your own concern, but this moves beyond into the realm of property theft. The collection I maintain--"

"This is a personal interest. They have some information I want to learn." He turned up the force of his glare, and suddenly knew how to be more effective and decided to and just _pushed_, deepening the shadows in the room until the soul-spheres were tiny pinpricks in the well. "I wouldn't suggest interfering."

The Soul Hunter couldn't agree fast enough. He was still staring as Morden made his way out the door, up the stairway beyond, and into the dying sunlight of the rocky wasteland outside.

Morden picked a direction where he wouldn't be facing into the sun and started walking. He wished he had a ship, or a map. He wished he knew how he'd done... whatever he'd just done. But he didn't know; he knew a little about dark matter, and a lot about Anla'shok Lennier, but he didn't know how he'd just reconstructed himself on a molecular level or how he'd played with the light in the room. If he knew that, maybe he'd know how to tell what planet he was on, or if there was any chance that he could walk to a starport. Or if said starport was in the direction he was going. Or what he was going to do even if he could get off this planet.

The day dimmed. He looked around, startled that the sun had passed the horizon so quickly. He couldn't even see the Soul Hunter's tower from here; he must have been walking longer than he'd thought. The desert spread out in crags, canyons, and dry stream beds in every direction, and with the sun down the heat was fading from the air. He found a good-sized rock and sat down on it, pulling out Kolann's sphere.

"You in there, Kolann?" he asked, holding up the bubble.

He saw a swirl of thoughts, memories, flashes of words... but no coherent presence.

"Kolann?"

Nothing. Certainly not the testy voice he'd come to know. Frowning, he looked deeper into the sphere... and _reached_.

Kolann's presence snapped into view, the Minbari looking more startled than ever. "How did you manage _that_?" he asked.

"I don't know," Morden answered. "I don't know how I'm doing a lot of things. Look, Kolann... I know the Minbari's dim view of Soul Hunters, especially the Religious caste. Do you want me to break this thing and let you out?"

Kolann's tiny image opened his mouth in surprise, then closed it again. After blinking in shock a few times he asked, "Why should you do this?"

"Why shouldn't I?"

"You are a human. You worked for the Great Enemy. You have no reason to wish me well."

"Except that you're the most coherent person I've talked to in the last year. Not counting Lennier." He shook his head. "The war is over. Both of them are. Neither one ended with one side destroying the other." He _knew_ that, knew the Shadows were gone and the Vorlons, too. "I just want to get back to being a decent sentient being and forget all this nonsense."

Kolann gave him a long, calculating look. "I think, Mr. Morden," he finally said, "That you will find that a most difficult endeavor." Before Morden could respond, the Minbari nodded sharply and said, "Thank you for your offer and for your companionship, Mr. Morden... I would very much like to rejoin the rest of my generation in the place where no shadows fall."

Morden nodded and held out his hand, concentrating. The walls of the sphere crumbled, and for an instant, Kolann's spirit balanced on his palm, a warm ball of light, brilliant in the twilight. Then it vanished, whispering up and away into the upper atmosphere of the planet.

He got to his feet and started walking again.

In a couple of hours he was cold, tired, and hungry. The desert was empty of any other structure, or life. Everything he saw was brittle scrub or rock. He sighed. It would be his luck to get away from the Soul Hunter and then die of exposure.

There was a large outcropping of rock to his left. He made for it, climbed through a couple of shrubs, and found a perch that wasn't too uncomfortable to rest in. He was asleep only moments after he got settled.

When he woke, it was after dawn, and hot. He swallowed against a taste in his mouth that tasted like the unholy spawn of old carpet and looked around for anything that resembled a water source. Nothing. And the temperature was climbing fast.

He knew he wasn't going to get far by walking into the desert, but he didn't have any other ideas. After a few moments staring out over the miserable terrain, he fished into his pocket and brought out Henrietta.

The glass pulsed with an irregular orange glow. Morden held it up to his eyes and tried to see inside...

_She smiles and says, "So explain it to me." She's leaning back in the visitor's chair of Dr. Terre's office, while the relatively young astrophysicist on the other side of the desk is paging through simulation records on his computer. He looks up and gives her a mocking glare._

_"You don't really need to know any of the theory behind this, you know. If the drive doesn't work in the first place, you won't go anywhere."_

_"I still want to know." And she does. She leans forward, pressing her hands on the desk. "C'mon, doc, you're strapping me to this widget, you might at least help me understand how it does its magic."_

_It's fortunate that Dr. Terre isn't so serious about his work that he lets a fighter pilot get his goat. He shrugs, turns off his computer's monitor, and straightens into lecturing mode. "Well, it basically works by folding space. You're aware that natural folds in the fabric of space-time exist around gravity wells?" When she nods, he continues, "Well, with the right materials, angles of shielding, and energy output, we can convince a body to funnel the force of gravity until a greater fold is achieved. Actually, by that point it's less of a fold than a wave. We've had the technology to create gravity waves for decades now." He folds his hands over each other and waits, smiling._

_"You're waiting for me to ask you why we haven't done this before. I'm going to answer you. Money."_

_"Actually, no." The doctor grins. "The biggest problem was that we didn't have sensitive enough detectors to compensate for the presence of dark matter."_

_"Now, remind me. Dark matter..."_

_"Is what most of the matter from the Big Bang formed into. Clouds of it. Over time, our kind of matter, baryonic matter, condensed on top and formed the paint-splashes of stars and galaxies we see today." He smiles softly. "We are froth on a sea of photinos, Lieutenant Greylark. Truly a precarious miracle, far outnumbered by that which lies beneath us in the vasty deeps."_

_She is startled by his sudden poesy, but smiles gamely. "But you've gotten good at seeing what it looks like, right? So I'm going to be fine in my little silver surfer?"_

_"If all goes well, you'll be just fine..."_

Morden blinked and put the sphere back in his pocket, shaken. It was disconcerting to see... to _remember_ through Henrietta's eyes. He wondered how much Kolann had figured out about _him_ in his own little memory flash. Then he realized it didn't matter any more. Kolann was dead, and he didn't have the option of coming back.

"Gravity waves, huh?" He looked around, then shielded his eyes against the sun and looked into the sky. Dark yellow, no help. He closed his eyes and wished he was... well, anywhere else, almost. Back on Babylon 5. Back on Centauri Prime before things went to hell. Back on Mars, before he'd ever heard of the Shadows or their blasted Z'Ha'dum. For a fleeting moment he even wished he was back in New Jersey, but stopped that thought before it got too depressing to contemplate.

He was starting to doubt he'd find anything else on this planet, starport or settlement, but at this point he couldn't think of anything to do but walk.

The sun rose another five degrees in the sky. The rocks and dirt were starting to find their way into his shoes. He ignored them, resolute, determined to keep walking until he found something worth investigating or he thought of something better to do. He was feeling particularly proud of his physical stamina when he happened to look down and see, not five feet from where he was standing, a line of footprints crossing his path at an oblique angle.

He took a few steps forward and stared dumbly at the tracks. No doubt about it, they were his footprints. He walked in a circle a few times to be sure. Yep. His footprints.

Morden was very good at not panicking. He'd been working for the Shadows for six years straight; he'd had his share of bad news and tense moments and nuclear explosions. He didn't panic. He started walking again, quickly, and when he was out of sight of his earlier track he started running. He'd find something, dammit, he wasn't going to spend the entire day running around in circles, he was not going to wait for death out in the desert, he was going to run until he found something because there was something for him to find and he was going to find it before it killed him and the Soul Hunter found him and took his soul and put it back in the little crystal ball that he had in his pocket and he was choking, stumbling, and he had to stop running before he killed himself.

He looked around. The land was barren, with no friendly boulders to sit on to catch his breath. He decided to not sit on the ground and concentrated on taking deep breaths to speed his recovery. He walked in a small circle, rubbing his fingers through his hair and breathing the air, which was--

Which was almost completely devoid of oxygen, now that he stopped to notice it.

Apparently, he mused, he now had a small chemical testing facility somewhere inside his skull. He took another experimental whiff of the air. Mostly carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and sulfur dioxide, his brain told him, and it occurred to him that he shouldn't even be able to breathe the last without going into some sort of spasm.

Morden walked in another small circle, rubbing absently at the back of his neck. He needed to think. He needed to relax. He needed some water, he was going to get heatstroke if he continued like this, and...

He supposed that after learning he didn't need oxygen it shouldn't have come as such a shock that he wasn't thirsty. But that realization was the one that shook him, heart-fluttering panic that had him collapsed on the desert floor, shivering and staring down at the ugly, rust-colored dirt.

He needed help.

He needed... someone. To talk to someone. He'd never been much for talking with people, but he needed someone else to be the voice of reason. He'd just found dormant Shadow technology in his head, that he didn't have because Londo had cut it off--no. This was not the time to panic. He needed to go over what had happened to him before it scared him to death.

He needed someone who had an idea what had happened, or could at least wager a few guesses. And someone who wasn't mostly insane, inside a bubble, and named Henrietta Greylark would be a wonderful start.

Picking himself up from the ground, he tried to make a list of people who had the necessary background. It was a very short list, and he'd have a hell of a time talking to most of the people on it. John Sheridan, Delenn, G'Kar, Londo, Vir, Lyta Alexander, and Lennier pretty much all wanted to kill him for one reason or another. Galen had probably died on Z'Ha'dum, but if he was alive he'd likely vanished to wherever techno-mages vanish to when they don't want to be found. And all the people working with the Shadows had either been driven insane or killed. Not that he could imagine having a useful discussion with, say, President Clark.

Why did all the pleasant people have to be working for the bad guys? He brushed off his hands and tried to think of someone, anyone else.

Well, there was...

No, that was suicide. And the Shadows had never confirmed it, anyway. But... if it were true, he'd have enough firepower to blow Morden out of the sky, which would hopefully be an asset and not a problem.

Morden even knew where to find him. Really, the biggest challenge was that he had no idea how he'd cross unknown light years of vacuum without a spaceship or any idea of where he was starting from.

Well, he thought irritably, he'd done enough miracles recently without having any idea of how he'd done them.

And if all he had to do was reach--

_He remembered pressing his hand to the side of the ship, listening to its song, hearing it tell of its adventures tumbling into the void..._

And if he could listen--

_He remembered listening as it told him about that journey into hyperspace, the smooth feel of the layers of space folding across its skin, the murmur of information stretching between the stars..._

And if he just took a couple steps across the gap--

The surface of the planet slammed into him like a speeding car. He stared at the dusty ground for a few seconds, breathing in the grey-orange grit, and slowly realized that his left arm was broken.

"Definitely some work needed on canceling velocities," a voice said from somewhere above him, "But not a bad first attempt. And please, never, ever do that again."

Morden rolled over onto his side, then onto his back, and blinked up at the softly glowing figure above him. "I broke my arm," he said dumbly.

"Yes, you did. You should be more careful when attempting to use hyperspace for your own purposes. There's a reason that the younger races are still confined to starships and space stations." The figure leaned forward until it resolved into a Minbari male, in robes and build both lighter than Kelonn had been, with an expression of mild concern on his features.

"You're Draal, right?" Morden asked, ignoring the criticism for the moment.

"Yes, I am. And you are Mr. Morden, liason between the Shadows and their allies among the younger races."

"Right." Holding tightly to his left arm, he rocked himself forward until he got his feet underneath him and staggered to an approximation of vertical. Draal watched, still with an expression of haughty concern. Morden cleared his throat. "Uh, if you don't mind..."

"You'd like some explanations or speculations on your current state, as you find yourself in with many new abilities you are not used to?"

Morden blinked a couple times. Draal's expression had been replaced by one of smug satisfaction. "Is it written on my back or something?"

Draal laughed. "No. But it is somewhat obvious from your presence here, not to mention your unorthodox and quite noisy method of transportation. I myself have been tracking your progress for a while, and I think I can tell you a number of things about yourself that you may not have been able to figure out." His face turned suddenly grave. "I suggest we adjourn to the inner parts of the planet. I have advice to give you, and if you do not heed it, you may end up destroying a good part of the universe... and yourself along with it."

With that cheery statement, he vanished.

Morden stared at the spot where Draal had stood for a moment, then sighed and looked around for some way to get under the surface of the planet. He knew about the five-mile-deep chasm and the landing pad, but he hoped he'd be able to find a service hatch or something. He really didn't feel like climbing down five miles of canyon with a broken arm. He didn't feel like doing much with a broken arm, actually. He stuffed his wrist into his jacket and grabbed his fractured humerus to keep it from shifting, then started walking in a likely direction.

His sense of likely direction was improving. There was an elevator shaft, with a working elevator inside, not fifty feet away. He kicked a loose rock aside and stepped into the tube. Draal must have been paying attention, because the elevator sprang to life, shutting Morden inside and whisking him off to what he hoped was close to his destination. He leaned his head against the side of the elevator and tried to block out the pain in his arm.

Sooner than he thought feasible, the car came to a stop and the doors slid open. Morden stepped out, looked around the lushly furnished sitting room he'd been deposited into, and cocked an eyebrow at Draal, who fuzzed into visibility just inside the door on the opposite wall. Draal smiled and spread his hands. "I thought this might be more comfortable than the physical space I reside in."

"I didn't know this place had guest suites."

"Oh, yes. The Great Machine was not initially meant to run without maintenance. Though only a skeleton crew remains, this planet was once a bustling center of activity, tended to by the race that made this planet their home."

Morden listened with half an ear as he collapsed in one of the chairs and attempted to not jar the break. Gritting his teeth against the stabbing pain he growled, "Fascinating. Can you do anything about my arm?"

Draal looked at him with that amused superiority he seemed fond of. "No, but you can."

"Ah." He grimaced. "One of those things, then. Well, if I had any idea how I made the damn arm in the first place, I wouldn't need to ask you for help."

"No, you wouldn't. But I am glad that you did. It gives me the chance to impart several pearls of wisdom that you will need if ever you wish to lead a relatively normal life."

Morden looked up, met Draal's concerned gaze. "You mentioned something about destroying the universe."

"Yes." Draal smiled darkly. "You are a weapon, Mr. Morden. You were rebuilt after Z'Ha'dum was hit by Captain Sheridan's atomic explosion, and were meant to be a last resort weapon against the Vorlons in case they broke the ancient agreements on which the War was based."

"Ah." Morden looked down and tried to fit his mind around this... news. It didn't want to fit. There were too many sharp edges. "And they never told me because..."

"It wasn't necessary for you to know. As long as they held the controls to those powers they had granted you, and never allowed you to disturb matters beyond your ken, you had no need to fully comprehend the abilities you might one day have access to." Draal's aspect turned ponderous again. "But the Shadows have gone, Mr. Morden. They have left, and are now beyond the edge of the galaxy with the other First Ones, exploring the dark spaces between. And all of the old rules have been swept away."

Morden realized a minute later that he'd been staring at Draal in shock for about a minute. "Um." He swallowed against dryness and groped for something to say. "Do you have any coffee? I think I have a caffeine withdrawal headache."

"There is a lot to understand," Draal said in what he probably thought was an understanding tone of voice. "Fix your arm. I'll try and figure out how to make... coffee."

Draal fuzzed out of existence, leaving Morden to gingerly rub his eyes and listen to the throbbing pain in his left arm. Wonderful. He was left to his own devices, with instructions to fix his arm without blowing up part of the universe, and his reward would be a substance that a mummified Minbari considered an analogue to coffee.

He sighed and turned his attention to the broken bone. Gingerly probing it with his fingers, he determined that the bone wasn't shattered or suffering a compound fracture, it just had a large number of cracks running its length and a nice, clean break. He closed his eyes and pinpointed the calcium growths he'd have to stimulate in order to--

Wait a moment.

He opened his eyes again and reached around to the back of his neck, right at the base of his skull, and felt under his hair. The micro-port the Shadows had installed was still there, just tactile enough for him to feel the difference when he was searching for it. Even after a total body reconstruction, the machine was still in his head. And it was still feeding him information.

At least he knew where all the strange instructions were coming from. The thought sat uneasily in his mind as he fixed the break, then moved on to other, minor concerns. He'd removed the remaining dust from his suit and some small scrapes from his hands by the time Draal reappeared.

"Ah, good," the Minbari said. "I've found the relevant information. Your, er, 'coffee' should be ready in a minute or so."

Right then, coffee was the last thing on Morden's mind. "The machine, the implant the Shadows stuck in my head. It's still there."

"Mmm, yes. Their use of organic technology is most impressive."

"I thought..." Morden shook his head. "I thought I'd just used my own DNA as a template. I didn't know I'd remade their machine."

Draal smiled. "The Shadows work in mysterious ways. I daresay that without the knowledge contained in their machine, as you call it, you would have had no control over your new powers at all. And that would have had grave import for all of us."

"Wonderful." He watched Draal fiddle with one of the panels on the wall until it opened to a kitchenette. He assumed the fiddling was for his benefit. It wasn't relaxing at all. "So what now? I can't exactly go back to my old job. Either of them."

"No, but you don't have to eat, drink, sleep, or breathe either. That makes your necessary income somewhat lower."

Morden considered that. "True."

"If I may offer another suggestion?" Morden nodded. Draal crossed to the table, bearing a tray with a pitcher and a cup of something that smelled like coffee. "The First Ones left a great deal of information behind in various places. The younger races are still in discord. You are probably the best-equipped, and one of the best-trained, to go after that information."

"Hunh." Morden stared through the cup of coffee on the table. "Well, it's closer to my old job. Sounds..."

It sounded like fun, actually.

"Try the coffee," Draal said anxiously. "Tell me if I got it right."

He picked up the cup absentmindedly. Yes, it sounded like fun. And say what you would about working for the Shadows, it hadn't actually been a lot of fun. But digging up ancient civilizations was what he'd gotten into archaeology _for_.

The coffee was brilliant, as good as the best he'd ever tasted back on Earth. He burned his tongue on the second sip and started to laugh.


	2. Act 2: Antistrophe

Act 2: Antistrophe. 2264.

The system was called "Ahzken" in the oldest manuscripts that he could find, and its fourth planet was a glorious desolation. From space the biggest continent looked like a broken piece of agate, all swirls of green-brown with occasional clouds for contrast. Abandoned cities littered the banks of the rivers, long gone to rot of the wood-beetle and creeping vine sort. When Morden landed his borrowed techno-mage flyer outside the largest city in late 2262 he scared off a colony of predators that looked like a cross between a platypus and a liati, but found nobody to answer his signals. For the next year and a half he broke into buildings, marveled at the preservation of many of the interiors, and looked for an explanation. When he found it...

The database was a black box, about two feet by three by one. Accessing it wasn't a problem. Along with refreshing his skills in excavation, he'd spent the last two years playing with the new powers at his disposal. He was sure he still hadn't discovered all of them, but he'd learned enough that interfacing with electronics was a trivial exercise. The electronics of his former associates were easier than most. The box was certainly theirs, and it told him enough.

It told him why the Vorlons and their allies had never attacked Ahzken 4.

It told him why the Vorlons and their allies had never wiped out the Shadows completely, or vice versa.

It told him why the Vorlons and the Shadows were fighting in the first place.

Morden slammed his fist into the table next to the database, stood, and started pacing. He'd spent the last two years in research, and in trying to come to terms with exactly what he'd done.

Galen had come to him with the conclusion that the Shadows had been controlling him with his own endocrine system, using his brain to play mind games with him. The kid had been right, but only partially. Morden remembered what it had felt like to be in contact with the Shadows, and he remembered how it felt when they spoke to him--the absolute, crushing certainty they'd had that what they were doing was right. They'd turned everyone who had worked with them into zealots. If everything the Shadows were doing was right, then those who carried out their orders had to be right, as well.

But the Shadows had gone. Their communications had gone. Their subtle drugging had gone. And looking back at his actions over the course of the War, Morden couldn't countenance any of it.

He glared at the database again.

He couldn't countenance it. And he never would have done any of it if he hadn't been drugged and brainwashed, no matter what he'd promised on Z'Ha'dum.

Morden's eyes kept flicking to the featureless black box of their own free will. He stopped in the center of the room, closed his eyes and put his hands to his head. He couldn't countenance murder on that scale. Santiago, Adira, Refa, the techno-mages, the millions of Narns and Brakiri and other races... he couldn't. Millions--_billions_. Dead. Directly his fault. He _couldn't_ believe that he'd choose the same of his own free will. It had been easy when he'd been working for them, but after, when he'd come to his senses...

He was staring at the database again.

He stalked over and slammed his hands down onto the black surface, accessing frantically. Billions of years of recorded history. Art, music, sculpture, speeches, literature, philosophy. Names and faces. The physical forms of all the old races. The jumpgate makers. The quiet progress of technology. The meetings of the old kind. Ahzken 4, the neutral ground. The discovery.

The discovery.

The truth.

Morden jerked his hands away. No. He'd been lied to so often, why should he believe this?

But, a voice whispered inside his head, doesn't this mean they didn't die in vain?

No. He had been wrong. That was all. He should have had the strength of character to throw away the promises and accept his fate at the core of a ship. He should have fallen on his sword instead of causing so much death.

He shuddered, remembering Sheridan when she'd left the ship. Cold. Distant. Broken. No wonder her husband had seen straight through her. Morden couldn't imagine living his life like that.

Again, the database. Why?

Why else?

His hands were shaking. He forced them into his pockets. There was a bookshelf lining one wall of his workroom, filled with trinkets and note pads and a glowing orange sphere. He went over and reached out a hand, touched the surface of the sphere gently. "Henrietta?"

"... Morden?"

He closed his eyes. He'd never been able to get a good image of her, but he could see fragments, brief snatches of color, eyes, hair. "Henrietta, I've found something... worrisome."

A swirl of colors, darker now. "Bad?"

"I don't know." He took a deep breath. "I need your help."

"Help... I don't... I don't know if I can help you."

"I have to know something, Henrietta." He paused, winced as he realized how much he was asking. "I have to know what happened when you made your jump."

Everything was still for a long moment. Then her sphere went dark.

"Henrietta, please..."

A low moan. "They were looking at me..."

He winced again. "I know. I need to see."

"I don't want to look..."

"Please?"

For a long time, nothing. Then a glimmer. A shape.

It hit him with the full force of liftoff...

_"This is Frederik Pohl to Gateway Base. I am go for ignition. Shall I proceed?" She is holding her hand over the small silver button. Above and ahead, the canopy of stars stretches far and away. It's taken weeks to get past the orbit of Jupiter, but she's finally here, ready to take the giant step for mankind. All that stands between her and history is the final confirmation order._

_It's quiet, in the dark, watching the stars. She's getting lost in her thoughts. The crackle of the radio brings her around. "This is Gateway Base to Frederik Pohl. You are go for ignition. Proceed." A quiet second. "Godspeed."_

_She swallows against sudden dryness. "Thank you, Gateway Base. Until my return." Her return seems a tenuous, fragile thing against the vast darkness before her. Her hand seems disconnected as it reaches out and turns off the signal key, then returns to the button._

_She closes her eyes. "My God," she whispers, in her own private ritual, "It's full of stars."_

_She punches the button._

_Her eyes snap open. With a brilliant flash, she is elsewhere, her view suddenly filled with shifting tides of red and black--(Hyperspace, Morden thinks, we got there before the damn Centauri found us)--and then back, the stars suddenly different, and then elsewhere again, for long enough to track some of the shifting patterns, back in realspace, time enough to snap a picture of the stars, if she'd had a camera, and then flash, gone, flash, back, flash, flash, flash..._

_After a long enough exposure, the human mind gets used to anything. She watches the flashes for almost an hour before she drags her eyes away and watches her screens. That's when she sees it, sitting on her six like a dark bird, following her path through the jumps._

_It's bigger than her ship, but she can only see its outline in the gravity compensator, She watches it, frozen, through a long series of jumps, and it follows her effortlessly, never left behind by the whiplash speed of her transitions. She watches it with growing fear, because Dr. Terre never said that a photino cloud could do this, could follow her through her transition, get caught up in her wake._

_Until now, she has only been scared of coming into realspace off course, unable to compensate for this thing that is following her. But now as she watches, the great black shape changes. Like some dark omen, it flaps unseen wings, and as the Pohl hurtles onward toward its programmed end, the dark ship reaches out and brushes through the delicate instruments._

_The drive keens like a dying swan and shatters, thrusting the Pohl back into realspace, and Henrietta can only grip her console and watch as sparks fly and her monitor reads nonsense words and her air recycler, her only line of defense against her own metabolism, shorts out and dies..._

She was sobbing into his shoulder. Morden held her, tightly, feeling the flashburn of memory fade and most of the fear with it. He buried his face in her hair and told himself it was past, it was gone, and it wasn't even his memory, but the black void of space and the blacker creature that had swatted the Pohl out of the sky remained hovering on the edge of his mind.

He squeezed his eyes shut. He didn't want to take Henrietta's memory as proof. He didn't want to take anything as proof. But...

Morden paused in his thoughts. Then he reached up and stroked Henrietta's hair. "Hey?"

She sniffed, pulled away slightly, blinked back tears. "You believe me?"

He smiled, tried to be reassuring. "Of course."

"What does it mean?"

He lost his grip on the reassurance. "It means... I have to think about a few things. About what all the First Ones were really doing."

She shook her head. Her hair was blonde, and curly, and it brushed against her shoulders. "I don't understand." She stared into his eyes. Hers were deep, startling green. "Who are the First Ones?"

"I used to work for..." his breath caught as he suddenly understood. She frowned. He looked back at her, mentally wincing. "I just realized something."

"What?"

"You're still inside the Soul Hunter's sphere. I'm still out there."

"Oh." She stepped back. She wasn't crying any more. "I... oh." A twisted smile. "I guess that means you have to go back."

He nodded.

"Okay. I can deal with that. It's... all right." She blinked a couple times, fast. "Can you come back?"

"I don't know how I got here in the first place." He shrugged awkwardly. "I don't know."

"Right, right..." She turned away and started pacing.

He took the time to study her, now that he had an image. She was only a few inches taller than he was, a rarity. She was dressed in some sort of uniform, one he didn't recognize, dark grey. Her movements were military, but with a slight edge of hysteria, like a toy soldier wound three settings too tight. She paced until her spring wound down, then turned and looked at him, her breathing now even. He awkwardly shoved his hands in his pockets as she nodded, thoughtful, composed.

"What are you going to do?"

Going to do. God. As though he hadn't already done enough. "I don't know that, either."

She tilted her head to the side. "Well. You have to do something, right? What do you think you've found out?"

"I think..." He couldn't keep looking at her. "I _think_ I've found out the reason for the War. The real reason. But only the First Ones really know."

"So go ask them."

"I can't!"

She crossed her arms and gave him a challenging look.

He shook his head. "The galaxy's big enough as it is. And the First Ones are somewhere outside it."

"Surely they left some trail?"

"I... maybe." The beginnings of a plan glimmered. He wasn't sure if he believed it. "Maybe..."

She was nodding. He looked up and smiled, trying to be reassuring. "I think I know where to go. We'll talk more on the way, all right?"

"Right." She was smiling bravely, but her knuckles were white from clenching her fists. Then she dissolved, he was outside, and he was staring at the database again.

Dammit.

He scooped up Henrietta's sphere and tucked it into his pocket, then turned sharply on his heel and headed for the ship, leaving the black box on his desk. The Shadows wouldn't need to see their own history.

His ship, which he only tentatively thought of as 'his', used to belong to the techno-mage Galen. Galen had left the ship on Z'Ha'dum, which meant it had been caught by the Eye and moved to somewhere convenient.

He'd found out that Z'Ha'dum had been destroyed during his sojourn on Epsilon 3. Draal showed him the recordings. It made for a depressing afternoon. But the next planet in was a convenient dumping ground for lost ships, including Galen's techo-mage flyer. With only a little coercion he'd called the ship to Epsilon 3 and used it to start his new career.

He'd give it back if he ever ran into Galen again. If Galen had survived, which for some reason felt likely.

Techno-mages used tech built by the Shadows, which gave Morden the only advantage he had in piloting the ship. He pulled away from the lonely world and set the ship in a quiet orbit. Then he closed his eyes and tried to figure out where the First Ones had gone.

The last battle of the Shadow War had been fought at Coriana 6. He'd been able to get that out of Draal before he left. There were a few abandoned techno-mage probes in orbit around the planet. He accessed them through the ship, flipped back a couple years, and looked for the departing Shadow ships. The Vorlons used jump points, but it was possible, just, to tell which way the Shadows were going by their exit velocities.

He pulled up a map, plotted the course, wondered if he could trust the results, and ordered the jump to hyperspace.

It was a long time spent waiting. Morden spent his time divided between explaining galactic politics to Henrietta and not thinking about what he'd found in the Shadows' archive.

Whether it was his ministrations finally paying off or finally forcing a confrontation with her worst memory, Henrietta was clearer than she'd ever been and much easier to talk to. The conversations went all right, until she raised an eyebrow during one of his explanations of Centauri machinations during the War and asked, "And how did you find all this out? What were you doing during the War, anyway?"

What _was_ he doing during the War, anyway?

He didn't talk to Henrietta for days. When he'd stopped the shaking in his hands and picked up her sphere again, she didn't ask any more questions about his work.

He was spending some quality time not thinking when the alarm rang to signal the end of his journey. He checked to make sure Henrietta's sphere was still in his pocket, then told the ship to drop out of hyperspace.

The blueshift of the vortex cleared to reveal the sparkle of distant galaxies ahead, and the wide band of the Milky Way behind. Slightly to starboard and almost three million light years away, a few more members of the local group of galaxies hung suspended.

Morden stared at the vast emptiness ahead and wondered how the hell he was going to proceed from here. He only had one clue--a direction--and one piece of solid information, that they weren't in his galaxy any more. The whole plan seemed suddenly like a colossal waste of effort and time. He should go back, ignore the black box on his desk, and try and look for more information.

He'd just turned away from the viewscreen in disgust when the proximity alarm shrilled. Startled, he turned back, and found himself staring down the main cannon of a full-sized Vorlon warship.

Well, he had been looking for First Ones... summoning his courage, he activated the comm system. "This is the ship... uh... God Only Knows to Vorlon warship. I need to... talk to someone. In charge. I need some information confirmed. I mean no harm."

He didn't have to wait too long for a response. "Techno-mage."

"No, no," he said. "It's a techno-mage ship, but I'm not one. I'm Mr. Morden. I used to work for the Shadows."

Well, that did it, he thought as he watched the main cannon power up and the communication channel snap closed. He closed his eyes.

The blast ripped the tiny ship in two, and everything went white.

It stayed white for a long time.

Late afternoon on the New Jersey shore. The waves crashing against the beach, the sound of seagulls crying in the sky. He was fourteen and taking a well-deserved break from working on school. It was cold, even for early October. He lay back, fingers trailing in the sand, and tried to forget about life. He wasn't ready for responsibility. He just wanted to lie here and let everything drift away.

"You're going to have to wake up sometime, you know."

He knew that voice. He didn't want to wake up. He was going to lie here until he was cold enough that facing his parents was a reasonable option. If he waited long enough, they'd just ignore him when he snuck back into the house.

"You have as much time as you'd like, of course, but people have been asking about you. I'd like to give them a more heartening answer than 'still sleeping on the beach.'"

He knew that voice. But he hadn't heard it until... until after...

Babylon 5?

No. He knew where he was, when he was. He was home, New Jersey, and he'd come here after a particularly bad fight at home, over his grades, and he was going to stay here until everything had calmed down.

The same voice sighed, then said, "You're a long way from New Jersey, Morden."

"No..." he answered blearily, then blinked his eyes open.

Ambassador Sinclair was standing over him, smiling sadly. The air was clear, the sky blue. Morden looked around. They were on a long stretch of empty beach, surf pounding shore only a few meters behind the ambassador.

He looked at Sinclair again and stared, as the Minbari held out a hand to help him to his feet. "Entil'zha Valen," he finally said, and accepted the help.

"Mr. Morden," Valen replied. "And it's just Valen, or Sinclair, or Jeff. Come on. Now that you're back on your feet, there are some people who want to see you."

Morden looked around, stalling for time. When he'd caught his breath he asked, "So, am I dead?"

Valen grinned. "No more than you were before you got here."

"You know what I mean."

"No, this isn't any sort of afterlife. Not in any metaphysical sense, anyway. The lines get a little blurry." He gestured toward the dunes. "This way."

Morden shook his head and started trudging up the sandy slope. Valen fell into step beside him. "So... where are we?" he asked after a minute.

"In a song called the House of Light and Turquoise. Physically, we're on the surface of a topographically interesting Dyson sphere surrounding the galaxy M32, one of the satellites of Andromeda."

Morden stopped walking. "Sur... surrounding?"

Valen smiled. "Sure. M32's only about eight thousand light years across, but it gives everyone who wants to live here plenty of real estate to play with. We got lucky; Lorien managed to negotiate a prime spot for the folks from our galaxy to settle. Just look up."

Valen tilted his head back, and Morden followed his gaze. For a moment, all he saw was the endless, deep blue of sky. Then, as though layers of paint were being stripped away, the blue pulled back, the sky opened, and he could see everything.

Andromeda, the spiral galaxy, was blazing across the open sky in hues of white and violet and blue, stretching its arms wide to brush fingertips of pulsars and white dwarfs against either horizon. He stared, openmouthed, until he felt a hand on his shoulder and pulled his focus back to the beach, Valen, and the dunes around them.

"You got lost for a minute there. Don't tell me you want to go back into a coma."

Morden stared at him. The sky was blue again. "What's going on?"

Valen laughed softly, not unkindly. "It's going to take a while to explain everything. But you came here to talk to the First Ones. And they want to talk to you. But they're very busy with their own plans, so they put you here to recover."

"Recover from what?"

"Well, for one thing, the Shadows fixed the halfassed job they did on your implants."

Morden's hand went to the back of his neck, on reflex. "The, uh, weapon thing?" Another thought struck him and he reached into his pockets. Empty. "What happened to... mmm, I was carrying a Soul Hunter--"

"Henrietta's fine," Valen said, holding up a hand. "In fact, she's better than when you last saw her."

He was starting to remember. "The Vorlons fired on me. I thought I was dead."

"No. They're very good at... moving things. People. They just wanted the ship destroyed. It's standard practice that people who come here don't get to go back."

Morden mulled that over as they walked. Once they were over the crest of the dune, the going got easier. He paid little attention to their surroundings until he realized they were walking on a tiled path through a garden.

He spun around to check. There wasn't even the suggestion that they'd been near a beach a few moments before. Valen waited as Morden forced down a minor panic attack and stared at the pathway, the trees, the flowers.

"We were just..."

Valen nodded.

"And now we're not."

"Sort of. As I said, the lines are a little blurry."

Morden sighed in exasperation and turned in another circle, taking in the layout. Squares within squares, and lots of tiny archways, like an Escher monograph squashed into proper dimensions. "This is a Markab garden."

"Yes, it is." Valen sounded pleased by his recognition. "There's a pretty big Markab population here. It's somewhere between a hundred and a hundred and fifty million."

"Rescued from the plague?"

"Not all of them." Valen started walking again, and Morden followed quickly, realizing that if he got lost in this place he was going to stay lost for a while. "Most are actually descended from people in the Shadow ships that survived the last war. The one a thousand years ago. The Shadows were taking a lot of them for processing units because they reacted better than any other race."

Morden looked sideways at him. "Don't tell me, they all came from the island of Drafa."

"You're good at that guessing thing."

"Thanks. I always assumed I wasn't hired for my looks. And I'm going to guess that this means there must be a way to get people out of a Shadow ship without... breaking them."

Valen nodded.

"Ah," Morden said, as they came to the edge of the garden and the world changed colors. Under his breath, he muttered, "Damn."

The beach had been bathed in late afternoon light, the Markab garden in the glow of dusk, and this new space was filled with early morning mist and sunshine. Their path led down a terraced garden to a plateau over a creek, four tables set under the open sky, one of them occupied by a pair of women facing away from the trail. Valen started down the path, Morden at his heels. "What's with the lighting changes?" he asked.

"Mostly it's the topography," Valen answered. "The suns move, but we're covering a fair distance with each tesseract we make."

Morden was trying to think of an acidic enough response to this unhelpful answer--what the hell was a tesseract?--when they came around a switchback and he could make out the faces of the women at the table. One of them was Henrietta. The other, possibly more surprising, was Dr. Elaine Scott, one of the team from the Z'Ha'dum dig.

They had been talking, but they turned to watch as Valen led him to their table. "Hello," he said.

"Hi," Henrietta said. Her eyes were wide, slightly nervous. "We were just talking about you."

"No wonder my ears were burning." He nodded across the table. "Dr. Scott."

"Dr. Morden. Good of you to join us." She smiled, suddenly. "Sit. Nobody's going to bite."

He was surprised by how relieved he felt. "That's the best deal I've gotten all week," he said, pulling out a chair.

"Well, you know. We were all in things together."

"Some of us more than others."

"I've been getting stories from people," Henrietta said. She hadn't taken her eyes off him. "I have to admit it's a little spooky."

He shrugged, stiffly. "It seemed like a good idea at the time."

"I know about that sort of deal."

"Look," he said, impatient to get out of this conversation, "it's great to talk about old times and all, but I came here for some information." He glared at Valen, whose expression was still neutral.

"Information," Valen said carefully.

"These... photino creatures, or whatever. The ones that she saw--" he pointed at Henrietta, "the ones who wrecked her ship."

"They're real," Dr. Scott said quietly. The fine lines around her eyes deepened, perhaps involuntarily.

"And they don't like us?"

Dr. Scott shook her head. "I'm no astrophysicist, but apparently what they don't like are supernovas. Or other unstable stars."

"So," Morden said, his earlier formless terror returning, "They're shortening the lifespan of the known universe? By _several billion years?_"

Valen and Scott traded a glance. Henrietta was still staring at him.

Morden scowled. "Where are the goddamn First Ones?"

Presence. "Here," a voice said, as he whirled out of his seat, the chair legs making no more complaint than a hiss against the ground. The Vorlon hovered, twisting in the air, its form slowly coalescing in golden light. "I am here," it repeated, "And I will answer your questions."

"You lied to us," Morden said, angry and terrified and shaken. It was hard to focus on the twisting shape and he fought the instinct to close his eyes.

"Yes." The Vorlon suddenly solidified. Its form was that of a giant, coiling snake, six eyes like coals in an elongated head and glowing a muted orange all throughout. It was, Morden realized, a simplified version of what the Vorlons had looked like before their species had decided to transmute themselves to pure energy.

He added it to the list of amazing things he'd never be able to tell anyone about and focused on the Vorlon's reply. "_Why_ did you lie to us?"

"We feared the consequences of the truth. The younger races are unpredictable in their speed, and causing panic throughout the galaxy would have been counterproductive."

"So you slaughtered us instead?" He was yelling. "You waged wars, enlisted millions--billions to die, instead? Narn was flattened by the Centauri, Brakir was nearly as bad, the Markab were wiped out by your plague, seven planets don't _exist_ any more, and just as many are missing the first few layers of crust--THIS WAS BETTER THAN THE TRUTH?" He was screaming. He knew he was screaming. "THE SHADOWS WERE RIGHT?"

He didn't know wasn't looking behind him but they had to be staring at him and the Vorlon just sat there and cocked its head to the side and said "Yes."

He was past screaming. Past it. "You... fucking..." he stepped forward, and held up his hand, and there was electricity like lightning curled around his fingers. "I can't believe you..."

Someone backhanded him across the face. Not literally. "Calm down," said the Vorlon.

He clenched his hands into fists. "You expect me to, after that?" But he was already relaxing, already loosening his fingers, breathing slower.

Embarrassed, he looked around. Scott was staring. Valen looked slightly distressed, but unsurprised. Henrietta, for a wonder, was smiling. "Sorry," he said.

"Tell the fuckers off," Henrietta said, and when Scott turned to stare at her she bared her teeth in something that bore only distant relation to a grin. "This is deep shit we're in, and I think the human race can take the news."

Morden grimaced and sat down. "I don't know," he said, thinking through the hole where his rage had been a few moments before. "People do all sorts of stupid things when they panic. But... dear God, _billions_ of people are dead because of that war." He glared at the Vorlon. "You didn't have to use the planet killers."

"Response is faster to an overwhelming threat than to a moderate one," the Vorlon said. "The impulse to create a united front was only fully realized when the enemy became truly impossible to reason with."

"Wait. I think I'm missing something." Morden held up a hand. "Sheridan's little alliance was the point of this whole thing?"

"Sheridan's quite large Alliance," Valen said quietly. "And yes."

"Ah." He looked around. "How much time do we have and what are we doing about it?"

Valen smiled. "Nice to have you on board."

"We're _all_ on board."

"We have approximately five hundred million human years," the Vorlon said.

Morden pinched the bridge of his nose. "Funny, how a few months ago that would have sounded like a really long time."

The Vorlon laughed--_laughed?--_and said, "For your races it seems so, does it not? That gives us hope."

"You're rather well-spoken for a Vorlon."

Valen smiled. "Whandall here is the head of relations between the First Ones and the inhabitants of the song called the House of Light and Turquoise. I'm serving as something like his attache."

"Whandall?" Morden turned around so he could stare at the Vorlon. It stared back. "Your name is _Whandall_?"

"Yes. It is a good approximation."

"Ah."

"And to answer your second question," a slightly less rattled Dr. Scott said, "Those of us who have any engineering skills are putting them to use learning and designing things. We might be able to figure out some way to communicate."

"Or escape," Henrietta said. "There's talk of finding another universe that's younger than this one and moving in."

He raised an eyebrow. "How come you know so much?"

"I got the full tour a couple days ago." She grinned shakily in Valen's direction. "Met aliens for the first time. That was a kick."

"Uh... hunh." Morden turned to Valen. "A couple days? I was asleep for a couple days?"

"Not quite." The Minbari held up his hands. "The Vorlons and the Shadows both wanted to look you over and make sure you were all right. You've been through a lot."

"Understatement."

"And then the Shadows wanted to fix the implants."

"You said." He grimaced. "Can't say I feel much difference."

Valen gave him a disapproving look. "You've been awake for less than an hour."

"Fair enough. And then I was put on the beach?"

"Yes. Where you slept for fifteen hours."

"Wow." He smiled, but it didn't feel quite right yet. "No wonder I feel like hell. Can I get some coffee in this place?"

"Ha!" Dr. Scott said. "I knew it."

Amused, he replied, "You drank coffee, while we still had it."

"Yeah, sure, but not seven cups a day. I don't know how you can hold your hands still with that much caffeine."

"Mmm," he answered. "Well?"

"Here," said Whandall, much to Morden's surprise. He stared at the Vorlon, who 'handed' him a cup of coffee. He blinked a couple times, then decided it would only be polite to try it.

"Thanks," he said shakily after a sip. "This is pretty good."

Dr. Scott shook her head. "'Pretty good.' Where have you had better recently?"

"Actually, Draal makes really good coffee." He took another sip, looked around. "So how many people are here?"

"Many millions," Valen said. "The human population's pretty small, but all the scouting parties that Earthforce sent into Vorlon space wound up here."

"Did anyone else from the Icarus make it?"

Scott was looking away, down at the table. "Not many. Razor, Standish... a bunch of the techs. Captain Hidalgo didn't make it." Her mouth twitched in a grimace. "It's been rough."

"What was it like?" Morden asked softly. He didn't want to know. He really didn't want to know. But he had to know. Had to ask.

"Oh..." She ran her fingers through her hair, white tufts sticking through haphazardly. "It was... I don't really remember all that well." She looked up and met his eyes, frowned at what she saw there. "Really. I think they did it on purpose. It's all hazy, dreamlike. I mean, I remember... I remember being... I was happy. More than that--I was really ecstatic, all the time. It was like digging up a whole new civilization every day."

She shook her head, pulled out of the reverie. "But that's really all I remember. No specifics."

"Probably for the best."

It was quiet for a while. Morden turned to look out over the water. It was peaceful, across the fast-flowing stream, meadowland giving way to deep forest, oak-likes and elm-likes and undergrowth around the fringes. The sun was moving up into the sky, deepening the light blue of morning into the rich cerulean of noon. The blackbody radiation from the sun was peaking seventeen nanometers longer than Sol's and the absorption spectrum was lacking a lot of iron. Morden closed his eyes, pinched the bridge of his nose, and wished fervently that the Shadows had just left him alone.

Mars. He should never have gone to Mars.

"... Morden? Everything all right?"

That was Henrietta. "Fine," he answered, looking back and trying to smile. "Getting better all the time. I think those implants are kicking in. Is there any way to walk around here without getting irrevocably lost?"

"The river is a constant," Valen said, waving at the creek below. "There's always a trail next to it, and it's easy to backtrack." He grinned wryly. "My son Tammis spent three years hiking downstream to prove that it's really one huge loop."

Heartwarming and completely uninteresting. "Sounds nice." Morden stood, nodded as courteously as he could manage. "I need to clear my head..."

"I'll stick with Henrietta," Dr. Scott said. Her expression was wary, and maybe a little concerned. "I should be able to find you, or vice versa. Just ask around."

He forced himself to not look back as he followed the path down to the edge of the creek. It was deeper than he'd thought, looking down; the current ran fast and smooth and sapphire in the center. The soft rushing of the water was the only sound other than his footsteps as he started downstream, and the quiet was like a blanket over the landscape that he was disturbing every time his feet landed on the path, kicking up small clouds of dust that settled quickly behind him.

It was hard to avoid thinking in the stillness, the only other thing to occupy his mind being the act of putting one foot in front of the other. As he trekked halfheartedly downstream Morden could only think of how easily the Vorlon had brushed his anger aside, and how little he knew of the Shadows, and how much he was still in thrall to them. A dull ache was starting to grow in his shoulders.

He tried to pay attention as the scenery changed, but there was a haze over his senses as he took the final step and found himself under bright sunlight, a different sun, a different river. Steep rock walls hemmed in the world around him, red-orange tapering upward to a seam of royal blue. The sun beat straight down onto the rushing river, which was cascading over rocks with a steady roar. It was hot. He slipped out of his jacket and started forward on the trail, a narrow ledge which slowly climbed and fell along the canyon wall.

Thirty meters in the trail swooped down to meet sand where the canyon wall widened, the river bellowing outward to form protected nooks of calm water where the swift-running current passed by. For the first time, he heard bird song.

There was someone else here. Warily, he stepped around the corner and came face to face with the ship.

Too small for a ship; it was a boat, a work of art, a glass butterfly perched on a tapestry of gold and green and white. Tapered sails of blue crystal raised over a shallow platform, ash-blonde wood inlaid with tiles in intricate mosaics, pure white railings curving like sea spray. It couldn't possibly have been buoyant enough to carry its own weight, but it settled gently on the surface of the water with only slight ripples in its wake, most of those from the woman who sat trailing her feet in the water.

She looked up and blinked almond eyes, smiling. She was physically small, black hair pinned up behind her head, dressed in an ochre shirt and matching pants rolled up to mid-calf and still speckled with water. "Hi," she said, after a moment. "Need a ride?"

He considered for half a second. "Sure."

There was a pile of filmy green fabric piled beside her on the deck; she took a corner and flung it towards him. It settled with a whisper into a pathway on the water. Morden toed it briefly, found it solid. With a little trepidation he walked across to the boat, on a surface that felt like nothing more than deep pile carpet.

He took a seat on a low bench on deck as the woman pulled the fabric bridge back from the water. It wasn't even wet. "So," she said as she bundled the miracle back up and stowed it beside her again, "you must be Morden."

"Must I?"

She grinned and held out her hand. "I'm Catherine, Valen's wife."

"Ah." He shook her hand. Rough calluses, strong grip. For an instant he was reminded of someone. "Yes, I'm Morden. Nice to meet you."

"You, too." She looked back over the water as the boat drifted into the center of the canyon, toward the stronger currents of the river. "So, how are you finding our humble abode?"

"Somehow I thought there'd be more people around."

"Oh, there are. But they're all in the cities. This is pretty far out into the wild, here, and people don't tend to travel here unless they want to be alone, or be alone with someone." For a moment Catherine sounded wistful. "Or discuss business, which is what I expect you were doing."

He mulled that over. "More or less."

"Oh, that kind of business?"

"Which kind?"

"The not-so-imminent demise of the universe." She looked up with deep, dark eyes, and smiled wryly. "I assume you're in already, or you wouldn't be here."

He sighed. "Yes, I am in. And yes, that's what I meant."

She looked back at the water. The canyon walls were sailing past smoothly, swiftly. The bird song was lost again. "Sometimes I wonder if they could ever have had our best interests in mind. The death, the destruction, the manipulation... all to create some dream of peace that might create some spectacular new achievements before stagnating." She smiled to herself. "Strangely enough, the Vorlons are really big on not stagnating. They fear they did it themselves for too long, and now we're paying the price."

"Sounds pretty unfair to me."

Catherine laughed. "Then, of course, I think it probably doesn't matter if the First Ones are using us, as long as we get survival out of the deal." She looked back at him again. "I know, it's very Machiavellian of me."

He grimaced. "I just have to wonder if the ends justify the means. I mean, I _have_ to."

She quieted immediately. "Of course you do."

He turned away and watched the water for a while. "Of course," Catherine said after a minute, "if we hadn't been pushed for so long, we might have ended up like the First Ones, only completely out of time."

Morden shot her a glance. "What do you mean?"

"Well, it took them a few billion years to go from the printing press to a computer, that's all. If we'd been moving on the same timescale we'd never have gotten... anywhere."

"I'm sorry," he said, feeling the bottom plummet out of his understanding of the universe again. "Did you say a few _billion_ years?"

"Yeah. I did the calculations when I heard the figures, 'cause I couldn't believe it myself. They moved slow." She grinned. "Which means, in a few hundred years, the younger races will be light-years ahead."

"If we don't blow each other up first."

"Well, depends on if the Interstellar Alliance holds together. That happening decreases the probability of our imminent destruction, or so I'm told." She flashed him another grin. She had nice teeth. "Of course, there's still the thriving community of artists and engineers around here, so hopefully even in the wake of a galaxy-wide nuclear firestorm we'll be able to propagate the species imperative."

Morden laughed, bitterly, since the moment seemed to call for it. Several billion years...

"I still can't believe how much they lied to us," he said after a moment. "I mean, everything. Everything was a mockup, an act. For thousands of years."

"Millions," Catherine agreed grimly.

"And the Shadows... they were deliberately cruel to people in order to build up their reputation." He sighed. "I probably can't trust anything they ever claimed."

_A vision: hyperspace, twisting, folding; a pocket, a ship; voices, screaming, pleading..._

"Oh, you can probably trust some of it."

He laughed again. "Right. Which parts?"

"That's the challenge, right there."

They were silent for a while. Suddenly Catherine said, "I wish I had a better name for the Shadows. Even though I haven't seen one since I arrived. They're hardly causing chaos and destruction in this galaxy."

"Well, they have one." He grimaced. "It's just ten thousand phonemes long, and it'll be tough to translate."

"Ten thousand. What does that work out to?"

He broke off his train of thought, which was already reaching after metaphors to try and put English words to the endless stream of Shadow letters in his head. "Uh? Good question. Ever read the Iliad?"

"Homer's Iliad?" She blinked in surprise. "Once, actually. It was a challenge."

"Yeah. The catalogue of ships is about ten thousand letters long." He stopped, thought about that for a second. "Well, in Greek, it is. It's a little longer in English."

She stared at him blankly.

Morden sighed and tried again. "It's like Tennyson's 'Ulysses', five times over."

"Ahh." She grinned. "That one I recognize. That is a lot to translate, from an alien language."

"It gets worse." He pinched the bridge of his nose. Shadow characters, millions of them, floated past his mind's eye. "All of the letters show up with different stroke widths in different places. With normal people, that's just standard variation. With the Shadows, it's important sub-textual information."

She was nodding, politely. He broke off with an effort of will. "I'm sorry. This is dull."

"No, honest. I just don't know much about the field." She smiled. "If you want dull, I can go into the practical techniques of an environmental survey."

"Thank you but no."

"So, do you have any of it translated?"

"I..." There was so _much_ of it... "Well, I know a little, just the surface. Something about the stars..."

He closed his eyes and called up the memory, the whispers of the spoken language, the layers and layers and layers of intonations that never got translated by the simple machine in his head, and the thousands of characters under his fingers as he pored over documentation. "We came... for the stars? From the stars? We were _called_, and taught, for the stars. We came for guidance, and wisdom. We joined, for destiny..." The words ran, and he ran after them, stumbling, "For destiny is all our voices joined in concert, all forces acting together to choose our path.

"We came with the others to create... something... We sacrificed... something in the city of light, and our great crusade went forward until the end of time, waiting."

He opened his eyes. "That's the first pass, anyway." He looked around. "Where are we now?"

They were still surrounded by cliffs, but these were gigantic growths of crystal, lightly tinted blue, with white sand and black rocks lapped by the river at their base. Morden could make out stonework, carvings in the walls, too far up to see clearly. Wind was whipping through the towers, sounding a weird music that tugged on the edge of his memory. It was colder, the sun hidden behind clouds. He was inexplicably reminded of the old Catholic church at the edge of town back home, with broken stained glass that let in angry rain the time he'd snuck in with some friends from school. He slipped his jacket on again and tugged it shut.

"The Minbari call this place Tai'eela. They pretty much took it over." Catherine was rolling down her sleeves, paying only slight attention to the scenery.

"Yeah, looks like them." A thought crossed his mind. "Do you and Valen stay here?"

She shook her head. "No, Jeff and I have a place in the city."

"Ah." He replayed bits of the earlier conversation in his head. "The city? You mentioned 'cities' earlier."

"There are two big ones. An Vatoll and Alfanne. Most of the nonMarkabs live in An Vatoll, and that's where Jeff and I stay, most of the time."

"Ah," he said again. He attempted a smile. "How much does an apartment cost?"

"Nothing."

"Sorry?"

She shrugged. "There isn't any mode of exchange, so there's no cost. There's plenty of space."

"Everything's free?"

"Everything your heart desires." She looked up and grinned. "Want to see the city?"

The river went everywhere, and it went to An Vatoll. A sprawling, unplanned community, the city buzzed with light and motion. Other boats appeared on the river, from tiny one-man kayaks to gigantic branching constructions that looked more like trees or coral than anything meant to carry passengers or cargo. The city sprawled in all directions on the banks; into the water and into the air, buildings and walkways arching and tumbling. The river was wide and calm, reflecting the light of the dimming sunset and golden lights sailing past for hours.

For a while he just watched. There were people everywhere, Minbari and Markab and every so often human, filling up the banks and the streets and the ships. Once they were buzzed by a trio of Centauri on an honest to God flying carpet.

It was organic, it was terrifying, it was exhilarating. It was more welcoming and more alien than any of the First Ones' dead, slow, regulated cities. Even the Minbari seemed to be having a good time.

"I like this place already," he murmured.

Catherine looked up, startled. Neither of them had said anything for over an hour. "Good," she said.

"So where are we going?"

"My place, first, to drop off the boat. Then... something to eat? Or we can find quarters for you."

"Food is all right."

"Great. One of my grandsons runs a bar downtown. We can stop in there."

He eyed her sideways. She still didn't look any older than he was. "Grandsons?"

She caught his expression, then laughed. "One of several."

"Ah." Something fishy was going on here. She'd been around on Babylon 5 as a contemporary. He decided it wasn't polite to ask and watched the steady flow of buildings on the bank.

"Does the river have a name?" he asked suddenly.

That earned him another glance. "Several. Agis Tei. The Tethys. Those are the common ones."

Agis Tei was the Markab equivalent of 'Rio Grande', hardly inspired. "Tethys. Interesting."

"That's from one of the crew of the Odysseus. I always thought that was a horrible name to give a ship."

"I flew on the Icarus. You don't need to tell me about unlucky Greek mythology."

He was getting used to her laugh. It no longer sounded as though she was enjoying a joke while he couldn't understand the punchline.

They sailed into a dock next to a grassy hillock, behind which curled an ornate complex in glass and gold. The grass was long, and lush; bright green. Dew brushed off on his pants as he followed Catherine across to the doors.

The elevator they took went down, and felt like it was moving out closer to the river. The suite it opened into was framed with gigantic windows looking out into the water. They were much farther down than Morden thought plausible.

"Nice."

Catherine grinned, blushed, and muttered something about 'embarrassment of riches.' "I have to get a photo album I promised I'd give Taylor," she said. "I'll be right back."

She ducked down a hallway. Morden strolled over to the window, through a dim sitting room, noticing details. The ceiling was low, and painted a color on the gold side of beige. There were filigrees and mouldings and well-kept carpet, but there were also wear marks around corners and threads pulled from seat cushions. Several bookcases stood in shadows against the walls; they were filled with real books, paperbacks with crackled spines.

Outside in the water a group of humanoids were diving. He stepped closer to the glass to get a better look. They were Abbai, swimming easily without breather units, wearing loose garments that drifted like seaweed and swirled in patterns as they traded places with each other in a slow underwater dance.

One saw him and waved. He raised a hand hesitantly to wave back. She giggled silently, clapping her hands over her mouth and twisting around. The others waved and laughed as well, and then suddenly vanished, sprinting downstream with inhuman speed.

"Ready?"

He turned halfway around to see Catherine standing in the middle of the room, expectant.

"I..." he said, feeling as though a thread of something precious was slipping through his fingers, "You know I never wanted any of this, right?"

Her eyes widened, and then she smiled sadly. "Yeah."

He looked back at the water and sighed. "I feel like I'm in over my head."

"That's life, right?"

"I guess it is." He watched Catherine's reflection twitch a lock of hair behind her ear and smiled a bit. She smiled back. "Okay. Right. We were going?"

They didn't quite use a flying carpet to get to the bar. Catherine had a two-  
seater flying machine, a boxy contraption that echoed the lines of her old survey ship. She patted its frame as she got in the driver's seat and Morden climbed in behind her.

The trip was surprisingly fast. Flitting through well-lit streets under the fading glow of sunset, Morden caught a few moments, flashes only:

--A trio of Drazi, playing instruments on the street corner, people dancing--

--A human woman whirling bolas which trailed fire and smoke--

--An intoxicated Markab vomiting in an alleyway--

--An argument between a Brakiri and a Minbari, sideliners enthusiastically placing bets--

--A Narn and a Centauri locked in a passionate embrace--

--A knife fight between two Vree, stilted and formal--

He leaned forward. "I haven't seen any Gaim yet."

"I've met a few. They're weird. They tend to keep to their own. They look nothing like their ambassador on B5, too. They aren't even bilaterally symmetric."

That was... disconcerting. "The Gaim ambassador hit on me once."

"Yeah? Me, too."

Catherine guided them onto the roof of an archway that stretched across several smaller buildings and parked the flyer between a giant swan and a model Minbari flyer the size of a surfboard. The swan eyed them curiously as Catherine led the way to a giant spiral staircase a few meters away which led both down into the center of the archway and up into darkness above. Morden shaded his eyes against the background lights and looked up, barely making out a platform at the pinnacle.

"It's a swimming pool."

He turned to Catherine. "Hmm?"

"Up there." She tilted her chin up at the staircase. "There isn't any other way to get up to it, so it's usually not too packed. But the staircase is a lot shorter than it looks."

"Ah." They were heading downstairs. The stairway was covered in black carpet, deep pile that sank half an inch under his weight. "One of those... tesseracts?"

"Yeah. They're all over the place. Little folds in space."

"Do you people get a map?"

She smiled. "Sometimes."

Morden had been in enough bars in the last few years to know when he was getting close to one. He'd also gotten a sense for quality. As they descended the staircase he heard laughter and soft music; he smelled alcohol and perfume and many sentients crammed into one space, and he filtered his perceptions and came to realize even before he got a look that this place was good. Not upscale, but actually good.

Roomy, and well-lit; more of the lush carpet covered the floor, gleaming in the light; the space was half-filled by tables seating four or five apiece, some covered in game boards and some in bottles, surrounded by sentients of every description (including a few of the Gaim, who were, as advertised, asymmetrical in the bilateral plane,) there was a dance floor tucked away on the other side of the bar itself, which was a magnificent dense curve of a deep red wood that shone golden as though oiled. Behind the bar was a man of mostly human features but with a Minbari crest; it was a crossbreeding he'd caught sight of a couple times out the windows of Catherine's flyer, though he hadn't realized until now how prevalent it was.

"Hi, Taylor," Catherine said, sitting down and pushing a binder across the table. A real photo album, like an antique.

"Hey, gran," he said, or the Minbari equivalent. "Who's this?"

"This is Morden," Catherine said.

"Hello," he said, since it seemed to be the thing to say.

"He just got in," she explained as Taylor reached his hand across the bar for a handshake.

"Oh, hey, nice."

"Yes, so far," Morden said. Taylor chuckled and retrieved his hand.

"So," Catherine said. "How about some drinks for your old gran and our new friend, here?"

"Sure. What do you drink, Morden?"

"Vodka tonic." He gave the bar another brief glance. There were a lot of bottles, thick glass with paper labels. "You have a nice place, here."

"Thanks," Taylor said, flashing a grin as he pulled down a couple bottles from that shelf and started mixing. Morden squinted to catch the label on the vodka. Stolichnaya Nova? Something like that. And free ice, which wasn't always guaranteed on a space station.

It was good vodka, too.

Catherine introduced him to some of the regulars, a trio of Markab who enthusiastically launched into a fairly technical description of the bio-inorganic mapping AIs they were working on. Morden nodded and listened with half an ear while he tried to determine, as an academic exercise, which of them were sleeping together.

"The thing is, the thing is," Dr. Tafar said, "None of the First Ones have experience with so-called programmed intelligence, algorithms, that sort of thing. They never used AI. They never needed it."

"What, never?" Morden finished his drink, slightly surprised at the empty glass. "I'd think they would need to use something of the sort when they developed computers."

"Ah-ah," Tafar's friend Kimil said. He slapped Tafar on the shoulder and nodded at Jilla, the female of the trio. "They didn't use computers like that. Right?"

"Right," Jilla said. "They had remarkable concentration. They discovered how to interface directly using psionics and managed all the controls themselves."

"Isn't that a little inefficient?" They were probably all sleeping together in a weird Drafan tribal arrangement just to throw him off. It would figure.

"Entirely inefficient!" Jilla said. "But that's how they operate. They had the concentration to micro-manage. So they did. It never occurred to them to delegate to a program."

"No operating systems," Tafar said. "Imagine it. It's fantastic. It wasn't until they started working on genetics that they had a conception of creating sentience. And then only as an extension of the normal life process. This is a completely new field to them." The trio grinned at one another, practically beaming.

That was the undercurrent, then. The feeling of discovering something new, that the Vorlons and Shadows and whoever else hadn't yet. _Ours_.

And just when he caught that, his empty glass threw itself off the table.

He started and looked down at it. Nothing had broken; the rug was that thick. The Markab were staring, surprised. "What was that?" Morden asked.

They blinked and shrugged. Morden sighed and reached down to pick it up. "_Falanistal_," Kimil muttered under his breath.

Falanistal, roughly translated as 'poltergeist'. Morden silently agreed. Then he looked around for a perpetrator, amazed at the different things he was able to watch if he concentrated. Heat, light, psychic energy...

... Henrietta and Dr. Scott descending the stairs...

Blink back to normal. They were approaching the table. "Hi, Dr. Tafal, Dr. Kimil, Dr. Jilla," Scott said. "Dr. Morden."

"Dr. Scott. Lieutenant Greylark." Tafal gestured. "Please, join us."

"Am I the only one here without a PhD?" Henrietta wondered aloud as she pulled out a chair.

"Catherine was here somewhere," Morden said. "I think she's talking to Taylor."

"So yes." She grinned. "If I hadn't spent so much time in the lab I'd feel really outclassed."

The Markab seemed to be putting the poltergeist incident out of their thoughts. Morden tried to do the same. "What got you into that position, anyway?"

Henrietta shrugged. "Basic gray ops training." At his expression, she smiled slightly and ducked her head. "Ah, I guess confidentiality doesn't matter now. But there's really not much to tell. One day I got offered a transfer to 'experimental and confidential,' and I took it. I was still taking orders, they were just more interesting."

He was going to respond, or one of the Markab was, perhaps, when a troop of Abbai came whooping down the stairs, six carrying a young woman on their shoulders. They were wearing elaborate masks and most had on fake Dilgar uniforms. The woman on their shoulders squealed in mock horror.

"It is Asha Makila's coming of age today," the leader of the women in Dilgar uniforms announced, "And we are ferocious Dilgar warriors who have captured her friend Lasi!"

"Eeee!" Lasi squealed again, completely unbelievably.

"Let's take her to the balcony!" one of the company suggested. The cry was taken up by the other 'Dilgar.' "To the balcony!"

They trooped past the tables, Lasi giggling and occasionally screaming. After a moment another Abbai ran down the stairs, without a mask but carrying a heavily-decorated long knife. "I'll save you, Lasi!" she cried.

"Hey, Asha!" Taylor called from the bar. "You'll need to be fortified if you're going to take on a compliment of Dilgar warriors." He held up a large goblet. It was smoking softly. "Drink this, first!"

She looked at him sideways. "Are you sure?"

"Sure, I'm sure. Happy Daguri."

Asha grinned and took the drink, blushing as the rest of the patrons applauded. She finished it in a triumphant swallow, then raised her dagger and followed the others out to the balcony.

Henrietta was grinning, even though she was confused. "What was all that?"

"It's called Daguri," Morden said. "Abbai tradition, very old, and certain formalities have to be observed. Looks like a lot of fun, though."

"I'd settle for a birthday party. I don't even know what today's date is."

"December 7th, 2264," he said. Then he wondered briefly how he knew that. "But we're a few thousand light years away, so if you look back at Earth you'll see sometime in 736 BC."

"Nice. Happy unbirthday to me."

Catherine had detached herself from the bar and took a seat at their table. "Hi, guys," she said. "Sorry about that."

"No problem." Morden looked around. "But I think I could use some sleep. Real sleep."

"We should find you a place to crash, then." Catherine stood back up and grinned. "Come on, let's go apartment hunting."

"Sure we're all awake enough for that?" Henrietta said, following. Dr. Scott was also on her feet. The Markab opted to stay behind.

"I'm not tired," Morden explained. He grimaced. "I could just use some sleep."

Scott caught his eye for a moment, but was past him, following Catherine up the stairs before he could ask what she wanted. Shrugging, he started ascending up into the starlit night.

The apartment they found was in a building occupied by mostly other humans, including Dr. Scott and Henrietta. It was furnished, in sparse neoclassical style; Catherine assured him there were plenty of places to get furniture around. After a brief look around, he got the key from the database, signed in, and was standing saying his goodnights to Henrietta, Catherine, and Scott.

Dr. Scott hesitated for a moment after the others left. He waited, letting her stay inside the doorway, even though he was starting to crave a little privacy. "Something on your mind?"

She closed the door, quietly sealing them both inside. She stared at her hand on the doorknob and took a breath. "Do you get nightmares?"

Oh, God. "Yes." That didn't seem enough. "Bad ones."

"Me, too." She looked over at him. "How can you stand it? I mean, I know you don't need to sleep any more."

He shook his head. "I tried that once. When I first started getting nightmares, I just gave up on sleeping..."

_Black--his blood was black, and that more than the pain made his hand spasm, and the razor dropped to the floor flicking drops of black black blood and he was going to be sick he could taste it, hand clamped around his wrist and doubled over--_

"What happened?"

Back. Breathe. He tried to force a smile, and he could tell from Scott's expression that it wasn't working, so he dropped it. "I had a really bad month."

She nodded.

"I think..." He took a breath. "I think that it's the only way to get away from it. And it's better than the alternative. A lot better."

"Even with dead Narns screaming in your head every night?" She rubbed her eyes. "I get that one a lot."

"Me, too."

She sighed. "Oh, well." She reached for the doorknob again. "Goodnight. I'll catch up with you tomorrow."

"Sounds good. Goodnight, Scott."

"'Nite, Morden."

Sheridan had taught him that, he thought as he closed the door. The team always used last names with each other, just to distinguish themselves from the corporate side of the business who forced intimacy by learning your first name and never letting go of it.

Strange he should think of her, in a place like this.

He sighed and turned to his new bed, to terrifying sleep.

Over the next few weeks he tried to overcome his lack of any nesting instinct with Henrietta's urging. He'd never been one to settle in. Not in college, certainly; and in his job he was always trying to get into the field. Rebecca had decorated their house, only occasionally asking his input. And when she and their daughter had died, well... nothing had really felt like home after that.

And, of course, the Shadows had more or less made him cease to care.

He tried to get enthused about staying. He tried to make conversation at Taylor's bar, to meet and get to know some of Scott's friends, but something kept nagging at the back of his mind.

He hadn't seen any of the First Ones since that first day meeting Whandall, and it was starting to drive him mad.

It was Henrietta who finally cornered him. After a few weeks of coaching he he still couldn't understand the technical jargon that doctors Tafal, Kimil, and Jilla used, but he enjoyed talking to them. He was heading out to Taylor's place to do just that when she met him in the hallway, arms crossed and head cocked.

"Something wrong?" he asked, hand still hesitating on the door.

"Mmmmm," she said, which didn't bode too well. "Mind if I come in?"

He shrugged and pushed the door back. She followed him inside, frowning at the interior. "Thought so. You're not even really trying, are you?" She flopped onto a sofa that had been pushed into a haphazard triangle with the other chairs by the viewscreen. The arrangement looked far more organized with her sprawled in it than it did otherwise, which said a lot about his decorating skills.

"Well, it's not like I do a lot of entertaining." He took a chair, cautiously.

Henrietta snorted indelicately. "You've got Feng Shui so bad it could kill a yak."

"That'd be a better use than I normally put my furniture to."

"Seriously, Morden. What's wrong?"

He sighed. "I don't really know."

She was studying him, green eyes narrowed, a thoughtful smile on her lips. He closed his eyes and searched for words. He was a translator; he should be able to come up with a few. "I should be ecstatic. I mean, this is what I wanted, right? A chance to start over, no obligations to anyone."

"But..."

"I feel like I'm abandoning--" he blurted, then stopped, because he couldn't put into words exactly what he felt he _was_ abandoning.

Henrietta frowned, brow furrowing. "The Younger Races?"

"Yeah." He nodded. "Yeah. I feel like I'm abandoning _us_."

"I mean," he pushed himself to his feet. He needed to pace. That meant maneuvering the furniture, but that was a minor obstacle. "I'm a translator. That's my job. That's really my only job. And the only thing I've been working on out here has been the name of the Shadows, which isn't exactly groundbreaking."

"Well, it is to me," she said. "Have you gotten any farther?"

"Not really. Well, I mean, I figured out that the whole first part is kind of a racial history, the whole photino conflict, that sort of thing. But there are some words in there that just don't have equivalents." He shook his head. "That's not important, though. There are things back home which are important."

Henrietta nodded, slowly. "You mean that database."

"Right."

"So... you're saying you want to go back?"

That shook him, right there.

Go back? It was ludicrous. The only reason he'd been left in any peace back in the Milky Way was that he'd stayed away from people, on planets that nobody had even heard about, and kept himself to himself. Was he really suggesting going back and walking up to... oh, John Sheridan, for example, and turning himself and the database over to the government? Any government? Mollari, for example?

It was a stupid idea.

"Yeah," he found himself saying. "I want to go back."

Stupid idea.

Henrietta smiled. "I was waiting for you to realize it." His confusion must have showed, because she laughed and said, "You've seriously got a guilt complex that you're not letting yourself face. And I don't think you really like being out here with the First Ones."

"Am I that obvious?" He glanced at the walls, absentmindedly looking for the energy patterns that meant 'Vorlon' or 'Shadow'. Nothing. "I think it's worse knowing that they're here and not doing anything."

"Yeah." She got to her feet, radiating satisfaction. "So. When are you going to tell Valen?"

He laughed. "Hopefully after I tell his wife."

Morden's first instinct was correct. Upon hearing his plan, Catherine tilted her head back, frowned, and said, "I don't think Jeff will go for it. The whole point is that we're not supposed to go back. But you can ask him, of course."

Valen's response was more to the point. "You want to WHAT?"

Morden reflected that he wasn't helping the situation when he replied, "What part of 'go back to our galaxy' didn't get through?"

Valen sighed and turned away. They were in Tai'eela, halfway up one of the blue crystal cliffs in a small meditation chamber. Catherine had directed Morden there when he'd asked. Now that he was actually here, defending his position, he wasn't so sure about his resolve. But he pressed on anyway. "I figured you were the person to talk to."

"You can't go back. None of us can."

Morden raised his eyebrows. "Who made that rule?"

"The Vorlons." Morden rolled his eyes. Valen frowned. "It's for everyone's benefit. We can't allow word of this place to get out."

"Why? What would be so terrible?"

"Well for one thing, the Younger Races have to learn that we can find the answers without the Vorlons and the Shadows showing us how to do everything. That won't happen if everyone thinks they've found the secret to life, the universe, and immortality and the Vorlons are keeping it locked up over here."

Morden narrowed his eyes. "Just how long have you been here, anyway?"

Valen gestured a sharp cutoff. "It's not a good idea to send anyone back. Besides, back there you're dead."

"That happened on Z'Ha'dum, too. A couple times. Never stopped the Shadows."

"The Shadows are gone."

"Yeah." Morden shook his head, as much to clear the sudden buzzing of translations welling up in his head--_We have been named by the stars and called by destiny to create the_ something _and become the_ something _and follow orders to change our destiny_--as anything. "But I have to do this. I just know it."

"We can't take the risk."

"Oh, who am I going to tell? Who's going to believe me?"

Valen smirked. "If you don't get anyone to believe you, you're going to have a hard time doing anything and you might as well stay here."

Morden sighed. "Point. But I'm not interested in leading a migration to come settle in the lap of the gods, here. I want the Younger Races to get things for themselves."

"So why go back?"

"Because all of that history, all of that information is sitting in a database on Ahzken 4, and I'm the only person who knows how to find it or read it." Morden hardened his glare. "And I think that's more important than some trumped-up concerns about secrecy."

A voice behind him said, "I concur."

Morden turned around a bit more abruptly than he would have liked. There was a tall, faintly familiar figure standing in the doorway.

"Lorien," Valen said. "I..."

"You... disagree," Lorien said, smiling. He turned luminous gold eyes on Morden. "But I think Mr. Morden has a quite persuasive argument."

Morden blinked and tried to focus past his feelings of deja vu. "Which one?"

"The wars of the First Ones created boundless change in the younger races. Without them, your races would doubtless have no hope of surviving the coming darkness. But the cost was terrible." Lorien's eyes were almost filling his vision. "Amends can never be made. But reparations can."

That wasn't an answer. Morden put his hand over his eyes, forcibly breaking eye contact and leaving his head thrumming. "Look. I... can I ask you never to use the phrase 'coming darkness' again? I've heard it too many times for it to be really effective."

"Is there another phrase that you would prefer for heat death and oblivion?"

"Oblivion is good. It sounds awfully attractive sometimes." He chanced opening his eyes again. Lorien had turned down whatever he'd been doing. "We've met before, haven't we?"

"Once. You were in no condition to remember me."

That meant... "Z'Ha'dum. After the explosion." He stared. "You saved my life."

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Galen asked me to."

That was a surprise. "Strange. The last thing I remember was trying to kill him."

Valen was turning purple. Lorien smiled. "Perhaps he was feeling especially benevolent. Perhaps he saw something of himself in you. Or perhaps the universe truly does have a will which moves us to a place where we can repay past kindness."

"We call that irony." Morden frowned. "What repayment?"

Lorien didn't answer, just tilted his head forward until the red gem in his forehead reflected glare into Morden's eyes. "What would you sacrifice, in order to leave this place?"

"I don't know. I'd have to see the offer, first." He looked away. The gem was starting to remind him of the Soul Hunter, not an entirely pleasant comparison.

"Your freedom?"

Morden looked up again. "What do you mean?"

"Would you be willing to work for us, again?"

"The last time I agreed to that I got my sense of morality switched off. Is this another one of those deals?"

Lorien smiled darkly. "We need an emissary."

"That's the dumbest idea I've heard today."

"You wanted an out, Mr. Morden."

Morden shook his head. "I was an emissary. For the Shadows. Sending me back as your official representative isn't exactly going to help your credibility."

"Credibility is not an issue if we don't plan to return. We require eyes and ears, not someone to argue territory."

Lorien smiled as Morden ground his teeth. "What, exactly, do you want me to do?"

"To go. To translate, and to watch. And to do all other things as you see fit." Lorien inclined his head slightly. "Always remembering that swift change comes with a price sometimes worse than inaction."

He hesitated. "Why did you leave those implants in me?"

Lorien didn't answer.

"All right," he found himself saying. "I'll do it."

"You'll need a ship," Lorien said. "Come. I'll show you the way to the docks."

He turned and exited the small meditation chamber. Morden fell into step beside him in the corridor. "What, I'm not allowed to use hyperspace for my own purposes?"

"That isn't the issue. The issue is that without a Vorlon ship, you won't be able to leave this area of space."

"... A Vorlon ship?" That was momentarily offbalancing. "Nobody else is allowed to leave?"

"Nobody else has any ships."

"Oh?"

"The other First Ones have decommissioned their fleets. The Vorlon ships are around in case of an emergency."

"Wonderful." Morden rubbed his eyes. "You know they shot at me when I got here."

"A necessary precaution. Come, I'll introduce you."

The corridor opened out onto empty space and terraces of crystal, a trail switchbacking down the sheer face. Morden reached out a hand to keep a touch on the cliff. "Those ships don't like me."

"You don't know that." Lorien was leading him downwards, nominally toward where Morden remembered the river to be. Every time he looked down, the next ledges got more indistinct in fog. "I've found them to be rather impartial judges of character myself."

"I'm sure I'll win them over with my remaining taint of Shadow, death and destruction."

"Negative thinking will help no one. You are getting a chance to return home and make amends to a galaxy filled with sentient beings aware of their own common ground as never before." Lorien turned around another switchback, which put him at about eye level with Morden. "The universe does not present us with writs of forgiveness for past actions. Your guilt and suffering are your own to keep for as long as you wish. I hasten to add, though, that they make life in any place uncomfortable, no matter how genial the surroundings."

Morden looked away. Lorien waited for a few moments before he began walking again. After a second, Morden followed. They were completely shrouded in fog, now. Lorien was a dark blur ahead of him in the mist. The cliff wall vanished underneath his questing hand. He took deep breaths and walked slowly forward, and down.

Another hundred feet and the fog thinned, and there were stars everywhere. There was no trace of a canyon now; up and down had only tenuous meaning, a fragile metal causeway under their feet and Andromeda sweeping tendrils of light over their heads.

There were ships among the stars. Lorien raised a hand, made eye contact with something too far off to see, and nodded. A shining speck disengaged itself from a darting school of other shining specks and dived toward them, coming to a silent halt beside the causeway.

Lorien turned to Morden, who was watching the ship with not a little trepidation. "This will be your ship," the First One said. "Introduce yourself."

Morden stepped forward. "Hi," he said. "I'm Mr. Morden."

He didn't know what he expected in response. It was a Vorlon transport, after all. Vaguely flower-shaped, soft yellow-green, alien and disturbing. The spots on its side shifted and rearranged themselves after a moment into three lines of Vorlon text.

Morden shook his head. "I don't read Vorlon."

(Not yet,) the ship spelled out in Shadow-text a moment later.

"Okay," he said, shooting a nervous glance at Lorien, "I'm willing to learn."

(My name is Ar'takkistem'inth!tnekiththvind!timanist.)

"Forgive me if I don't attempt to pronounce it." Morden shook his head. "Mind if I call you... uh... Orestes, instead?"

There was a long pause. (Acceptable,) the ship finally said.

"Good. Good. Nice to meet you." He turned back to Lorien. "Well, thanks for helping me out. I should... er, pack."

Lorien nodded, slowly. "There is no penalty for staying."

He had a dizzying image, for a moment, of walking downstream along the Tethys for ever, lost in thought and not noticing the sea-changes. "I think I'd better go."

"Very well." Lorien turned back to Orestes. "The ship will wait here until you return."

Morden looked over at the ship. "I'll try not to be too long."

(Time is of no importance.)

"I suppose." He turned around and looked back at the endless causeway hanging above the stars. He was getting practice with the tesseracts. If he squinted right, he could almost see them. Just little folds in space.

He took a few steps forward--

And he was on the balcony outside Taylor's bar, looking out on midmorning in An Vatoll. Convenient, indeed. Taylor's was closed, but there was a stairway down to the street, and there was a cafe nearby that he usually stopped for breakfast at with Henrietta and Scott. Hopefully one of them would be there.

Henrietta was, chatting in the mostly empty space in the back corner with two people Morden didn't know, a blonde woman and a black man who turned an intense stare on him as he approached.

Henrietta looked up and smiled as he took a seat. "Hey, did you eventually track him down?"

"Yeah, I did." He nodded an introduction at the other two--a couple, he noticed belatedly. "Hi, I'm Mr. Morden. I don't think we've met."

The woman smiled wryly. "Oh, I remember you. We met briefly on Babylon Five, sort of. I'm Talia Winters. I was the resident telepath when Sheridan had you in custody."

"Now I remember." He shook his head. "For what it's worth I'm sorry... and I don't cause that reaction any more."

Talia's smile turned genuine. "Don't worry. I received a pretty thorough apology already. I don't believe you've met Jason?"

"I don't think so." Morden looked to the black man and found he couldn't smile under that intense look, so he nodded again. "Hi."

"Hello."

"So what happened?" Henrietta said.

Morden shrugged. "Well, he wasn't happy."

"Who wasn't?" Talia asked.

"Valen." Morden shook his head, suddenly dizzy. "I won the argument. I'm leaving."

"Congrats," Henrietta said, as Talia exclaimed, "Wait, what?"

"I'm going back. Lorien argued in my favor."

"Ahh," Jason said, as if something important had been explained. Morden tried to read his expression, but he didn't appear to be paying too much attention. Talia was shaking her head slowly in disbelief, eyes wide.

"We don't get to go back," she finally said. "That was what Jeff told all of us. We don't get..." Talia reached up and held her head in her hands, then closed her eyes and leaned forward, resting her elbows on the table. Morden suddenly realized she was working hard at not screaming, or cursing, or something. He sighed, feeling another knot of tension start somewhere behind his ribs.

"I don't understand why I'm so special," he said. "I never asked for this."

"No, of course you didn't," Talia said shortly. She took a deep breath and leaned back, straightened out her arms. When she opened her eyes she had regained her composure. "I'm sorry, Mr. Morden, I shouldn't be angry at you. I just... can you do me a favor? When you go back?"

He was momentarily taken aback. "I'll try."

"I'd like to record a message for someone. I..." she took another deep breath, this time to cover some sort of explanation. Morden didn't press. "I _left_ her rather suddenly, and I never got a chance to say goodbye." She wasn't looking at him, but he knew what sorts of things would be in her eyes. "I want to at least tell her goodbye. I owe her that much."

"Of course," he said, startled by his own vehemence. Talia looked at him, and there was hope there, suddenly, and that was something, damn if it wasn't. "Just get me the crystal. I'll wait for you."

She sat there for a moment, startled, before smiling in relief and standing and excusing herself hurriedly. Her footsteps rang clearly until the door cut them off.

Henrietta was looking at him archly. "Isn't this breaking the rules a bit?"

"Hell with the rules," Morden said. "The Vorlons can just deal with it."

"Good," she said, nodding. "So you're leaving today?"

"I think so." He looked around the cafe. Nobody else had come in. "It's not like I have much to pack. But I was hoping to find Scott before I left."

"I think she's over at Metro, looking at game kits." Henrietta took a drink of water meditatively. "Isn't this a little rushed? I mean, I thought I just convinced you of the idea yesterday. You only had so many hours of running around to find Valen. And you've already got transport?"

"Lorien lined me up with a ship." Morden shook his head. "I don't know. He said something about wanting me to report on what's going on, but they grafted weapon systems onto my spine. Big ones. According to Draal, I could destroy a good chunk of the universe. Does that sound like reconnaissance to you?"

"No," she said, and she should know.

He sighed. "I just can't help but feel like the Shadow War isn't over. Or it's turned into something new, and Lorien's using me."

Henrietta wiggled her fingers at him. "Or he's worried this Photino thing will heat up, and he wants you over in the Milky Way providing covering fire until the cavalry can arrive."

He considered that for a moment. "Maybe."

"Enh. At least you'll have a freer hand." She leaned back in her chair and grinned. "And I will be enjoying all the free cocktails I want, with no hangovers, every night for ever. And probably getting all the tail I want, too. Do you think Taylor likes me?"

"He's Catherine's grandson."

"So? Everyone's someone's grandchild."

He shook his head. "I never got up the nerve to ask her how that happened, when I know for sure she was around on Babylon Five when I was."

"I asked." Whatever his expression was, it made her grin. "Some sort of time-travel rift. She got caught up in it and landed far back enough that she caught up to Valen at that end of _his_ time-loop. Which I think I almost grasp. She gave him a lift to this area of space after his other wife died."

"Right." He closed his eyes to let the facts settle. "Right, because Valen was married on Minbar, of course. There's something in Minbari legend about his children being persecuted."

There was a lull. Morden looked down at the menuscreen, punched for a coffee. Jason was still staring off into space. Morden fought the urge to wave his hand in front of the other man's face while a waitress appeared with his order. He burned his tongue on the coffee.

He frowned, fixed that. "I can't believe this is happening."

Henrietta smiled sympathetically.

"It's a matter of conserving resources," Jason said.

Morden looked at him. He was focused, sharply. "Sorry?"

Jason smiled. "I'm sorry, sometimes I'm somewhere else. Your predicament. It's a matter of conserving resources. It was expedient."

"I guess so." Morden frowned. "What do you mean you're somewhere else?"

"I've Become," Jason said softly. "I've crossed over."

He didn't understand. He looked, and then Jason smiled and dropped a layer of defenses, and he could see--and he shut his eyes fast, from that blinding signature. "Oh. Ow. I was using those retinas."

"Sorry." Jason smiled wider. "I see through people like that--but not you. It's strange."

"Oh?"

"Yes. It's good design. And you're not a telepath."

He was going to get whiplash following this conversation. "I... no, I'm not."

"Not right now. But you could be."

"Comforting, I'm sure." Morden looked down at his coffee, then back up as he heard Talia's approaching footsteps.

"Here," she said, handing him a datacrystal. She took her seat again as he took it and briefly held it up to the light.

"That was fast. Who am I delivering this to?" he asked, tucking the crystal in the inside pocket of his jacket.

"Susan Ivanova."

Well, it was a name he wasn't expecting, to say the least. "Well, if I can get it to her, I will. I think she wants to kill me, though."

"Thank you," Talia said quietly.

"It might be a while before I find her."

"That's all right." She smiled, a little bitterly. "It's been several years since I've seen her. I can wait a while longer."

"Try to not take that wanting to kill you thing so personally," Henrietta said. "It really isn't your fault."

He raised an eyebrow. "'Just following orders' has never been an excuse."

"Ahhh," she growled, throwing up her hands. "Have it your way. You'll have to figure it out eventually. You wanted to go find Elaine?"

The Metro was a shopping area a few blocks away. It was a short walk, and they found Dr. Scott poking through electronics. Her reaction was better than Morden expected.

"You lucky son of a bitch." She planted her hands on her hips and grinned. "Congratulations. Send me a postcard when you get there."

"I don't know if that'll be possible," Morden admitted, "but I'll try."

"It probably won't be possible." Morden looked up to see Valen bearing down on them, a small box in his hands. Valen held the box out to Morden. "Here, this is for you."

"Thanks, I didn't know you cared." Morden unlatched it and peered inside. "What is it?"

"Lorien had me track down a few things. There's a message in there for the Soul Hunters."

"Nice." He pulled out a datacrystal. "That would be this?"

"Yes. He wants you to tell them that they can stop working and come home."

"That... what?" Morden slipped the crystal back into the box and looked up, but Valen's expression didn't tell him anything.

"The full text is in there, but that's the gist."

"Right." Morden pulled out a slim gold case, about the size of a credit card. "What's this, then?"

"That's for the techno-mages."

"I thought they were all dead."

"No, a lot of them managed to escape." Valen watched him fiddle with the box. "It's 'tech', the stuff the Shadows used to provide. Except it's neutral, and it contains instructions on how to grow more from dead biomass."

Morden nodded and gave up trying to work the catch. "That will come in handy, I'm sure." He closed the box, and found it was just small enough to fit in his pocket. "Is there anything else?"

"Make sure Babylon Five doesn't explode while you're in the area." At Morden's curious stare, Valen grinned sheepishly. "As a personal favor."

"Sure." His mouth was suddenly dry. "There doesn't seem to be... I should be going." He turned to Henrietta and Scott. "Say goodbye to everyone for me?"

Scott gave him a reproachful look. "Sure you can't stay a few more hours to do it yourself?"

He wanted to. But he shook his head and said, "I shouldn't keep the ship waiting."

There was a chorus of nods.

Henrietta stepped forward, and to Morden's surprise, swept him into a hug. "Take care of yourself," she said as he awkwardly reciprocated.

"I'll be fine," he said. She pulled back far enough to give him a look. "Honest."

"Okay, then." She stepped back. "Just remember those postcards."

"All right. I will." He looked around at the others. "Goodbye."

It only took him a few steps to find a tesseract back to the docks. And then he was standing there, looking out at the endless deep, next to the transport.

(Hello again,) Orestes said, obligingly still in Shadow rather than in Vorlon. (Ready to depart?)

He took a deep breath, and looked up one last time at the sweep of Andromeda. "I guess so."

The hull quivered, then opened into a passageway. Bracing himself, Morden stepped inside.

He didn't know what to expect. He'd never been inside a Vorlon transport. Shadow ships had been dark, red, and disconcerting. This Vorlon transport looked an awful lot like a standard Earthforce shuttlecraft on the inside.

"Um," he said as he made his way forward and sat down in the pilot's seat. There were no seat restraints, and not many controls, either. "Is this normal?"

(No, but it's comfortable, I hope,) the console in front of him read.

He chuckled. "Well. Thanks." They'd started to drift away from the pier. "So begins the adventure. Hey, we can stop off and see your homeworld."

(That would be impossible.)

"Why? There's some kind of interdiction on it?"

(No. My homeworld was destroyed shortly after we left the galaxy.)

Morden frowned. "After? But that would..."

He trailed off, mind already racing ahead. Ar'takkistem'inth!tnekiththvind!timanist was not a Vorlon name. It wasn't even close to a Vorlon name. It came across in Shadow text because it was originally written in Shadow text because it was the kind of name that the Shadows had...

_We have been named by the stars and called by destiny to create the **starships** and become the **starships** and follow orders to change our destiny..._

"Oh my God," he said. "You're the Shadows. You're... All of you. All the Vorlon ships. We knew they were alive, but we never thought... why the hell were you _killing_ each other? Why the hell were you shooting at your own people? Shooting at your own ships? Why--"

(It was necessary.)

"You were killing each other..."

(Prepare yourself for the jump.)

"Shipwrights," he whispered, "That's what it should be. Not Shadows. _Shipwrights_..."

The stars ahead turned blue, then violet, then faded into black.


	3. Act 3: Epode

Act 3: Epode. 2267.

"We're on approach, Captain."

Captain Matthew Gideon, IAS Excalibur, pulled himself out of the mild stupor that staring into hyperspace usually put him into and nodded. "Excellent."

Matheson smiled and turned back to supervising the navigation station. Matt stifled a sigh and looked forward into the deep again. It wasn't that he liked looking into hyperspace. No sane person did, for long; it played tricks with your eyes. But it was always there, and always intoxicating to stare at.

"Sir?"

He looked up. Matheson was staring at him again, expectantly. "Yes, lieutenant?" he answered.

"There's a call coming in for you from Captain Ivanova of the Diomedes."

Matheson's tone was neutral, but the name still rang like a bell. Captain Ivanova? "This is the same Ivanova who..."

"Yes, sir."

"How long until we reach our destination?"

Matheson didn't even have to look. "Twenty-seven minutes."

Gideon stood. "I'll take it in the conference room. You have the helm."

"Aye, sir."

He probably didn't have to feel envious of how good Matheson looked in the captain's chair. Maybe if he spent less time wandering around deserted planets and more time on the bridge he'd feel more relaxed in it.

He stepped around the conference table and faced the screen. "Receive."

There was a pause as communications synchronized, then Captain Ivanova appeared on the screen. Matt had seen her picture before, of course; all of John Sheridan's command staff had become somewhat notorious, especially those who returned to Earthforce and took highly classified warships out for shakedown cruises on the far rim.

"Captain Gideon," she said.

"Captain Ivanova," he replied. "What can I do for you?"

"First off, let me reassure you that I know your current mission is important. But out here on the rim there aren't many full-fledged warships at any time, and there's something I'd like your help with."

That wasn't very reassuring. From what little he knew, the Diomedes was a prototype destroyer herself, perhaps not quite as nasty as the Excalibur but certainly capable of taking care of most problems short of an invading fleet. "What's the problem?"

Ivanova manipulated a control offscreen briefly. Her image disappeared, replaced by a camera's-eye-view of a blue-green planet. In the immediate foreground, sharply contrasted against the planet's cloudscape, was a ship.

"In case you're unfamiliar with the design," Ivanova said, "that--"

"That's a Vorlon transport," he said, astonished.

That wasn't possible.

"Yes, it is," Ivanova confirmed. "And yes, I know that's supposed to be impossible. The Vorlons are supposed to be gone. And yet, here it is." Her face reappeared, grave. "Captain, I don't know what it's doing here. So far it hasn't taken any hostile action, and we're not trying to communicate. But for all I know an entire Vorlon fleet could be hiding somewhere and waiting to pounce. I'd just feel better not going this entirely alone."

"Understood. We're on our way. Gideon out."

Matheson was deep in communication on his link, but he looked up as Gideon approached. "Twenty minutes to destination, captain."

Matt shook his head. "Change of plans, lieutenant. We're going to rendezvous with the Diomedes instead."

"Sir." Matheson was taken aback slightly. "Aye, sir." After giving the order to nav, he looked up again. "Eilerson won't be happy."

"Since when was he ever?" Matt shook his head. "I'll give a briefing in ten minutes in the conference room for the team. Let everyone know."

"Aye, sir."

"In the meantime, I'm going to do a little research."

Earthforce had files on the Vorlons. Very large files. There was nothing in them, of course. So Matt was slightly irritated when he returned to the conference room emptyhanded to find the rest of his team glaring at him with varying degrees of annoyance.

"There's been a change of plans," he said, hoping to forestall any complaints.

Max Eilerson had already settled into his chair and his attitude, somewhere between a huff and a sulk. "We're not going to Saulis Five," he said.

"No," Matt confirmed. "We're not."

The archaeologist shook his head. "Why is it," he said, still sulking, "that whenever we approach a site of actual interest to IPX we either turn around or leave before I get a good look at it?"

"Because we're trying to save the human race," Dr. Chambers said wearily. "Not turn a profit."

"Oh. I'm sorry. I thought trying to save the human race meant doing actual archaeology once in a while. Translating notes trying to find information that might help." Max shot another glance Matthew's way. "Which means occasionally landing on those planets we decide to land on."

"Something else has come up," Matt repeated. "We're going to meet up with the Earthforce vessel Diomedes and help them out with a little problem."

That elicited blank stares from everyone. It was Galen, leaning nonchalantly on the doorway in calculated distance from the official team, who broke the silence. "Well, I don't know about you, but helping a highly experimental destroyer with a problem they find too hot to handle was right on my list of priorities."

"An _experimental_ cruiser?" Max sounded even less happy. "A new prototype? Great. What can Earthforce's best and brightest not cope with that we can?"

Matthew reached to his link and brought the image of the Vorlon ship up on the monitor.

Reactions were varied. Most of the team had never seen a Vorlon transport before. Dr. Chambers looked as though she would say something, then changed her mind. Dureena gave him one of her 'Am I supposed to be impressed?' glances.

Galen started, then said slowly, "That's a Vorlon transport."

"Yes," Matt said, "it is."

"Wait a minute," Dr. Chambers said. "I thought all the Vorlons left when the Shadows did. What's one of them doing here?"

"I don't know. But since they are here, we've got a great opportunity." He nodded at Eilerson, who had dropped his sulk and was staring at the screen in naked interest. "The Vorlons were at the same technological level as the Shadows. If they've come back, maybe they can offer us a cure to the plague. If this is an abandoned ship... even taking apart their ship and the records aboard should set us ahead."

"Vorlon technology..." Eilerson whispered.

Matt checked the time. "We reach our rendezvous in three hours. When we get there we will be coordinating with the Diomedes. Nobody, and I mean nobody," he sent Galen a pointed look, "will be sending any messages, or making any contact with the Vorlon ship before we authorize coordinated communications."

Galen smiled brightly. "Sounds like an excellent plan. I commend you."

"I mean it, Galen."

"Oh, you needn't worry about me," Galen said. "I don't plan on going near it. Vorlons and techno-mages have an... mmm... less than salubrious history, to tell the truth. I'll keep quiet."

"Oh?" Eilerson said. "You guys get jealous that they're even more inscrutable than you are?"

"But you're staying?" Matthew asked, ignoring Max.

Galen nodded. "If there is a Vorlon on that ship, I want to ask why they've returned. And if there isn't... I want to know what is."

The Excalibur leapt to normal space in the shadow of the planet, just offside the Diomedes. A minute later, Matt was down in the docking bay, welcoming Captain Ivanova onto his ship.

"I don't understand why you don't want to coordinate from the Diomedes, Captain," he said as they took seats in the core shuttle.

"Easy," she said. "I have to assume that they're tapping our communications, so I want to talk to you in person, and the Excalibur has better sensors." She gave him a smile almost devoid of humor. "At least, the White Stars had better sensors than the Diomedes does. And I don't think Sheridan would have stood for a downgraded version on his newest pride and joy."

There was that feeling again, oh yes, of being in the same room of someone who routinely made history for a while. Good thing he wasn't easily impressed. "That's all well and good, Captain, but this is my ship. We can't have conflicting orders getting in the way of our operation."

"Of course not. It's your bridge." She leaned back and smiled again. "How many Vorlons have you met, Captain Gideon?"

He didn't bother answering. "How many have you?"

"Two, personally, or as personal as you can get. More on the other side of a firefight. I'm not questioning your ability, Captain, just your experience."

He smirked. "Touche. All right. You get first say. But I give orders to my crew, understood? Especially in combat."

She nodded. "Hopefully, it won't come to that."

"Hey, c'mon," he said as the shuttle coasted in to a stop. "Surely we can take out one transport without any trouble."

Ivanova's smile was grim. "Oh, the _transport_ isn't what I'm worried about."

Back on the bridge, Matt accepted the helm back from Matheson. Ivanova stood on his left, taking in the surroundings. "Nice."

"We like it," he said. "So. You have the experience with the Vorlons. How do you want to handle this?"

"They haven't hailed us so far," Ivanova said. "So we should try and open the conversation."

"What if they don't respond?"

She shrugged. "We think of something else."

Galen laughed behind them. "I love the completeness of your plan. Every contingency covered."

Ivanova looked over at the techno-mage, narrowed her eyes warily. "Who is this?"

"Captain Ivanova, meet Galen. He's a techno-mage and part of my team."

She glanced back and forth between them in surprise. "I thought all the techno-mages had left."

"Most of us have." Galen nodded enigmatically. "I am an exception."

"Obviously." She turned back to the view of the night side of the planet. "If things go sour..." she hesitated. "Jam their communications and destroy them. We don't want them calling backup on us."

Matthew nodded.

"Well," Galen said. "Let's hope the negotiations go well."

"Move us into line-of-sight," Matthew ordered.

"Aye, sir," Matheson responded. "Coming around the planet."

It appeared over the horizon like a yellow-green flower, one of the carnivorous ones. He snuck a glance at Ivanova. She was glaring at it, her chin tilted up slightly.

"I thought the Vorlons were the good guys," he finally had to say.

She spared him a glance. "Ever see a Planet Killer?"

He didn't have a good answer for that. After a few more moments, she cleared her throat and said, "This is probably close enough."

"Keep this distance," he told Matheson, who nodded. He turned back to Ivanova. "Is there anything special I should know before hailing them?"

She mulled it over for a second. "Try to be diplomatic," she finally said.

"Diplomatic," he repeated. "Great. Comms, open a channel."

At the nod, Matt raised his voice slightly and said, "This is the Interstellar Alliance starship Excalibur to unidentified Vorlon transport. You are in Interstellar Alliance territory in direct violation of your agreement with President John Sheridan. What is your purpose here?" The comms officer signaled they were sending. Matt looked at Ivanova. "Diplomatic enough?"

"We'll see if they start shooting."

"We're receiving a response," Matheson said. "Text-only. I'll put it on screen." The view of the transport was overlaid with lines of text:

(Hello, Excalibur. This is the Vorlon transport Orestes. I am here delivering a passenger. As a representative of the Interstellar Alliance, you are authorized to take custody of my passenger if you so desire.)

"Well," Galen said.

"Well," Matt echoed, and turned to Ivanova. "What do you think?"

"I think God is testing me," she said.

Matt opened the channel again. "Can we speak with your passenger?"

The response came swiftly. (That would be impossible. My passenger is in suspended animation.)

"Who is this person?"

(An associate.)

Matt sighed and closed off comms. "Suggestions?"

"I say go for it," Galen said. "Call me curious."

"Offhand I'd say it's a bad idea," Ivanova said. "But hell, I'm curious, too. I want to know who's so special the Vorlons decide to ferry them back here. A new ambassador? A scientist with a cure to the Drakh plague? Elvis?"

"Or a saboteur," Matt said.

Ivanova shrugged. "It's your bridge. But if it is someone we don't want to see, at least we'll know who they are."

"If this ship goes down, Earth's best hope for combating the plague goes with her."

"That also means you have the best containment facilities onboard."

Matt eyed the Vorlon ship. It was very tempting. Risky. A gamble...

He opened the channel one last time. "Orestes, why are you so keen on handing your passenger over to us?"

(It saves me the trouble of figuring out how to land.)

That startled a laugh out of him. "Fine. We'll clear you for docking. Synch up with our signal to initiate docking procedure." He stood. "Back down to the docking bay, then. Matheson, I want a squad with rifles and riot gear to meet us there."

"Aye, sir."

Ivanova was calling the Diomedes on her link. Matt turned to Galen, who was watching the approach of the transport. "Coming?"

Galen smiled. "I wouldn't miss it for the world."

Back to the docking bay. The squad was already in place when they got there, fanned out from the door in targeting formation.

The atmosphere equalized. Matt gave the go-ahead, and the riot squad preceeded them into the bay, taking up positions close to the wall. Steeling his nerve, he walked in, flanked by Galen and Ivanova.

"Well," Ivanova said, "This can't possibly be _more_ surreal than the last time I watched someone walk off a Vorlon transport."

Matt didn't get a chance to ask when that was, because the side of the ship... dilated, and the man inside stepped forward to meet them.

Impressions flashed through Matthew's mind quickly. Short, supremely self-confident, dark hair, bright eyes. He didn't get much more than that because Galen broke his train of thought by choking out, "You were _dead_."

The visitor smirked. "Yes. I was. I have a feeling that's going to come up a lot."

"No, I don't think you understand," Galen said, agitated. "Not, 'you were missing, presumed dead,' not, 'you vanished in that mysterious explosion,' not 'nobody could have survived that fall.' You were _dead_."

The smirk vanished. "I know. Believe me, I remember that part."

"What," Ivanova said, voice icy, "were you doing on a Vorlon transport?"

The man raised his eyebrows, looked back at the transport, then back to Ivanova. "Being transported."

She glared for a moment, then said, "I suggest we stick him in the brig."

"Is this going to be like the last time I was held without charges?"

"Just. One. Moment." Matt held up his hands. Once he had their visitor's attention, he said, "Hi. I'm Captain Matthew Gideon. The Excalibur is my ship. You are?"

The man smiled softly. "I'm Mr. Morden. I used to work for the Shadows."

Oh.

Matt couldn't stop himself. "Then what were you doing on a Vorlon transport?"

Morden rolled his eyes. "Nothing in particular. I was unconscious for most of the trip. Speaking of which, what year is it?"

"2267," Galen said.

That seemed to take Morden slightly aback. "Hunh. Long trip."

"To where, exactly?" Matt asked, trying to regain control of the interrogation.

Morden jerked a thumb at the transport. "The Vorlon ship wasn't a clue?"

Matt was about to retort when Morden held up his hands and said, "I'm willing to give you some real answers. But it's a long story and I'd rather not be standing up with rifles pointing at my head when I tell it. Might we adjourn to somewhere more... comfortable? Even the brig, if Captain Ivanova insists, as long as it has chairs."

Smooth. Very smooth. Matt snuck a glance at Galen, who still looked pollaxed, and Ivanova, who was quietly fuming. "Holding room D, I think," he finally said. "Sergeant Briggs, take a couple of your men and escort Mr. Morden there."

"Yessir."

"The rest of you, keep watch on this ship." He motioned Galen and Ivanova out ahead of him. When they were alone in the corridor, the door sealed behind them, he turned and opened his hands. "Well?"

"He's supposed to be dead," Galen said.

"I know," Ivanova said. "He died in the blast that Sheridan set off."

Galen shook his head. "No. He survived that."

"He survived a nuclear explosion? How?"

"He survived that," Galen repeated, ignoring her question, "and he died on Centauri Prime. Londo Mollari had his head cut off and stuck on a pike."

Matt exchanged a glance with Ivanova. "That sounds... fatal," he said.

"Extremely," Galen said. "I want to know how he managed this."

"So do I," Ivanova said. "He set up President Santiago's assassination with Clark. He stirred up all kinds of trouble on Babylon 5. If I didn't want to know why the Vorlons gave him a ride home from the Rim I'd shoot him myself."

Galen shook his head again. "He was a tool of the Shadows, not a conspirator. He didn't have control over his decisions."

Ivanova crossed her arms sharply. "'Just following orders' hasn't been an excuse since Nuremberg."

Galen turned to Matthew, an intense look in his eyes. "The Shadows were masters at manipulation. Everyone who they chose to work for them was given implants. Deep implants, completely controlling the endocrine system, nerve endings, and even subtler mechanisms. Their intermediaries had no free will, and didn't even know they wanted it."

"Where do you know this guy from?" Matt asked.

That set Galen back slightly. "The first stirrings of the Shadow War were heralded when Morden came around to the techno-mages and tried to buy our services for the Shadows," he said. "It was one of the things that precipitated our leaving. Morden... made some personal enemies, in that time."

"But you're of the opinion he was being controlled?"

"I'm certain of it," Galen said. "The signature of communication from the Shadows was unmistakable."

"And," Matt pressed, "you don't think he's being controlled _now_?"

Galen slowly shook his head. "I don't believe so."

"That doesn't change the fact that he _chose_ to serve them at one point," Ivanova said. "Just because he was under compulsion doesn't absolve him of guilt. I mean, that was a Shadow Planet Killer the Drakh tried to use against Earth. For all we know, Morden was instrumental in picking the targets the Shadows _did_ manage to hit."

"Well, we could ask him," Galen said.

"Assuming he'll give us any sort of answers. Assuming he'll tell the truth."

"I rather think he'll talk to me," Galen said. "And if not, there is someone else on board we might want to try."

Matt found himself staring in surprise. "Who?"

Galen shrugged. "Well, Morden was an archaeologist and xenolinguist when he flew on the Icarus to Z'Ha'dum. We could ask our resident expert in the subject if they happen to know each other."

* * *

Susan had been waiting since Galen's introduction as a techno-mage to be impressed with the gravity, wisdom, and depth of thought that John had attributed to them back on Babylon 5. So far, Galen seemed to be lacking all three. She followed him and Captain Gideon up through the ship and considered reasons why the techno-mage would be so concerned with the Shadowminion. She didn't like any of the answers she got. 

The resident archaeologist and xenolinguist, Max Eilerson, was in his quarters when they got there. He was late fortyish, had sandy hair, blue eyes, and was glaring up at them from a desk overflowing with crystals and printouts. "Ah. Captain. Galen." He made a conscious effort to modulate his voice when he spotted her. "Captain Ivanova. Nice to meet the person who's responsible for bringing us in. The chance to look at that ship is the chance of a lifetime. I've been reading up."

"Mmm," she said. "Be careful with your investigations. The ship might decide to eat you."

His grin vanished. "Um."

"Maximilian," Galen said, "we were wondering if you could help us."

Eilerson sent another glance at her, briefly. "With the ship?"

Galen pursed his lips. "Not... precisely. We were wondering if you knew someone. Another archaeologist and xenolinguist, actually. Dr. Morden?"

The title made Susan blink. Of course Morden would have a PhD. She shouldn't be surprised.

"What, Aaron?" Eilerson asked.

'Aaron'?

"Sure, I knew him," Eilerson continued. "He used to work for Earthforce, New Technologies division. Why?"

"We have him in custody," Gideon said.

Eilerson shook his head. "Must be a different Dr. Morden, then," he said. "The one I know has been dead for over ten years."

"Actually, we're pretty sure he's the same one," Galen said, looking smug.

The archaeologist was staring in disbelief. "He's alive?" he said. "Is he okay?"

"Nice to see someone concerned," Galen said.

"Of course I'm concerned. He's my friend." Eilerson stood, turned around and distractedly pulled his jacket from the back of his chair. "I have to talk to him."

"Somehow I have a hard time picturing Morden with friends," Susan said before she could stop herself.

"Everyone has friends, Captain," Eilerson said. "Lawyers have friends. Tax collectors have friends. It helped that he never wanted to publish. Unless he was really interested in something, I mean. He'd just throw away publishable analysis. I think he was put off the whole process in grad school, when his advisor published his work on Voynich without mention and then went on extended sabbatical in Rio. He's still getting quoted. Well, his advisor, anyway." He stopped fiddling and stared at them. "What's going on? Why is he in custody? What happened?"

Susan cleared her throat. "He was on the Icarus," she said.

"Of course he was on the Icarus. I know who was on the Icarus. I attend conferences with these people." Eilerson shook his head. "Stupid policy, if you ask me. They shouldn't name ships things like that; Icarus, Odysseus, even Agamemnon. It's bad luck. Do you know what Clytemnestra _did_ to Agamemnon?"

She shook her head, ignoring him. "The Icarus landed on Z'Ha'dum."

Eilerson broke off and stared at her. After a couple seconds, she elaborated, "Z'Ha'dum was the homeworld of the Shadows."

"I know that," he said, weakly.

"Anyone who did not choose to serve the Shadows was destroyed," Galen said. "Their bodies were used as the central processing units for the Shadows' ships. Those who did choose to serve..."

"He decided to do it," Eilerson said. "Judging by the way you're suddenly concerned about my feelings. Given his state of mind at the time I'm not deeply wounded. But what's happened to him now? The Shadows are gone. They've been gone for years. What's he doing here..." His eyes unfocused for a moment, then came back. "And if he was working for the Shadows, why was he on a Vorlon transport?"

Susan shook her head in admiration. "You picked that up a lot quicker than I thought you would."

"Thanks; it's my job to be the smart one. Correlating data. So I'd appreciate more of it."

Galen shrugged. "I don't know what he's doing here. Last I heard he was dead."

"Funny," Eilerson said, "Last I heard, too. Seems we were both wrong."

"The last _I_ heard," Galen repeated, "was that he had been decapitated. The Centauri decided that as the Shadows' representative, he should pay for their crimes."

Eilerson was looking ill. "Decapitated."

"Indeed."

He shook his head again. "I need to talk to him."

"Well, good," Captain Gideon said. "That's what we'd like you to do. Talk to him and try and get some answers."

Eilerson looked up and narrowed his eyes. "You're going to be recording this conversation, aren't you."

"Well, he is in a holding cell," Susan said. "That comes standard."

"Fine. But I'm not going to pretend otherwise. He is my friend."

"Nobody comes back from Z'Ha'dum unchanged," Galen said.

That elicited another glare. "Nobody comes back from having their family blown up unchanged, either. I'll consider it an improvement if he starts returning my calls."

He pushed past them out the door. Susan exchanged a glance with Captain Gideon and followed. "What do you mean?" she asked.

Eilerson turned slightly without slowing. "His wife and five-year-old daughter were killed when the terrorist group Aleph Omega took out the Io jumpgate."

Her stomach lurched. "Oh."

Gideon frowned. "What exactly happened?"

"Transport Leander was halfway through the jumpgate when the bomb went off," she said. "We only found enough debris to account for part of the ship, and no survivors. On either side of the jumpgate." At the confused looks, she clarified, "I was assigned to Io Station when it happened."

"Leander," Eilerson muttered. "Another stupid name for a ship. You know, if I were in charge, ships would get nice, neutral names. Like Telemachus. Nothing terrible ever happened to _him_."

"Except having his father go missing for twenty years," Gideon said.

"A trifle. At least he wasn't sacrificed to Artemis by him. Though now that I think about it, Iphigenia might be a perfectly good name for a ship. You'd be guaranteed fair weather."

"There is no weather in space."

"See? It works perfectly."

Susan ignored them and took a seat across from Galen in the shuttle. The techno-mage was watching the discussion, pensive. He turned his eyes to her and smiled. She ignored him and stared resolutely out the window.

On reflection, she mused, it wasn't strange that Mr. Morden--Dr. Aaron Morden, PhD--had a past, a life, friends... people he'd left behind. But it was unsettling. It had been unsettling when she'd learned that Bester cared for something other than the domination of humanity by the Psi Corps. She hadn't had much interaction with Morden, herself, so this was perhaps less unnerving...

Suddenly she wondered what the Shadows had offered him, that selling out the rest of the galaxy had seemed like a good idea.

The trip passed in uncomfortable silence. A short walk later and they were in the bowels of the ship, outside a security wall behind which was one Mr. Morden.

In front of the wall was a black woman in civvies, staring at a datapad and frowning. When they walked in she singled out Gideon with a stare and said, "Captain, this... doesn't add up."

"What's wrong?" he said, crossing his arms and cocking his head. Susan checked the monitors. Morden was pacing his cell, slowly.

"Everything is wrong." The woman sat down and buried her head in her hands. After a moment she looked up at Susan. "Sorry. I'm Dr. Chambers, ship's medical chief of staff and coordinator of the plague unit."

"Captain Ivanova, Diomedes," Susan introduced herself. "Has he done anything strange?"

"He hasn't _done_ anything," Chambers said. "His metabolism's so off-kilter I don't know where to begin. I mean, he's not _breathing_."

"What?" Eilerson said.

"I mean, he's breathing, but he's not respirating. There isn't any oxygen bonded to his red blood cells. His metabolism has completely shut off. But at the same time, I'm getting energy readings like I've never seen before, and ECG patterns that are more complex than the computer can handle." She looked down at her pad and bit her lip. "And that's not even the really weird part."

"What _is_ the really weird part?" Eilerson asked, something funny coloring his voice. Barely-controlled anger was Susan's guess.

Dr. Chambers was startled, but held up her pad. "Just after he got here, I picked up some odd resonance on the spectrophotometer... it looked almost like an organometallic coupling of some sort. I managed to chart some of it, but as soon as I tried for another pass it vanished."

"Could it be a glitch?" Gideon asked.

"I don't think so."

Gideon and Eilerson were looking at the datapad when Chambers said that, so they missed the look she gave Galen. Susan pretended she hadn't noticed and eyed the model on the screen. It showed some sort of pattern... a trace, almost, of thin wire-like lines running down Morden's back and parts of his arms. They didn't seem to connect up anywhere, as though the pattern were only partly complete.

"There's more like this, but that's the best image I got." Chambers pulled back her pad, tapped a few times, then dropped it on the desk. "This is ridiculous. I don't even know where he's getting his metabolic energy from. Zero-point energy? Perpetual motion? A really big, invisible thermocouple?"

"Luck? The good will of the Universe?" Galen suggested.

"You still think the Shadows aren't controlling him?" Gideon said.

Galen shrugged. "Do I think they had a hand in the anomalies that Dr. Chambers noticed? Almost certainly. However, that does not mean that he is under their control."

"How would you be able to tell?" Eilerson asked.

Galen gave him a significant look. "A few minutes' conversation should do the trick."

Eilerson glared back. "This is getting fishier by the nanosecond." He turned to Susan and pointed threateningly. "I'd better get a few good pieces to turn over to the company by the time this is over."

"Sure, I'll just take a PPG rifle and blow off one of the ship's guide struts," she suggested. "I'm sure it won't be missed."

"Ha, ha." He turned to the door guard. "Let me in."

The doctor looked worriedly at Gideon, then back at Eilerson. "You're serious?"

"Yes, doctor."

Gideon nodded his assent, and the security man punched a code into the door. Susan watched the monitor. Morden looked over as the door opened, stopped pacing as Eilerson walked through the door.

"Audio," murmured Gideon.

"Max?"

"Aaron?"

"What a--"

"What are _you_ doing here?"

The two men hesitated, then Morden took a seat, warily. "That's a real good question. A real good question."

"And what _happened_ to you? I mean..." Eilerson hesitated, then started to pace himself. "I mean, they're recording this."

Morden looked directly into the camera, smirked. "I know."

Eilerson stopped pacing and leaned against the door. "Shadows, Aaron?"

Morden sighed and looked down at his hands. "Yeah. It's a long story."

"A long story. _That's_ what you have to say for yourself?"

"It's not that--" Morden cut himself off with an aggrieved noise. "Look... how much do you know?"

"I know the Shadows were working with the Drakh," Eilerson snapped. "I know that it was a Shadow Planet Killer the Drakh aimed at Earth last year. And a Shadow virus they dumped into our atmosphere."

Morden was staring, aghast. "They _what!"_

Eilerson just nodded.

Morden groaned and put a hand over his eyes. "God. I leave for a couple years and the whole place goes to hell."

"And where were you before those few years, huh?" Eilerson said accusingly. "You died in '56."

"Well, no, we didn't actually--"

"And Galen said you got your head cut off."

"Well, I--"

"Your head cut off? What did you _do_, Aaron?"

Morden grimaced. "I had Mollari's girlfriend killed."

Eilerson made a little strangled noise. "_Emperor_ Mollari?"

Morden looked surprised for a fraction of a second, then nodded.

"_Jesus_, Aaron." Eilerson tugged the opposing chair out from the table and collapsed into it. "You're an archaeologist, not a secret agent. What happened?"

For a few seconds, Morden did nothing but stare at his hands again. Finally he said, "Earthforce Grey."

Susan traded a shocked glance with Gideon. Earthforce Grey meant black ops. Earthforce Grey meant connections, and shadowy places in the government she'd only gotten glimpses of before. Galen's theory of innocent little Shadow-minion was losing ground by the second.

"What?" Eilerson said.

Morden sighed. "Back in '53 or so, IPX had a team on Mars," he said. "They were digging for... oh, I don't know, Hoagland's Face, or glass snakes, or little green men. You know, something profitable." He grinned, but it didn't stick. "Except this time they found something. News got back to Earth, and to the boys in black. Before you could say boo they were plundering our department for experts and swearing anyone dumb enough to say yes to State Emergency-level secrecy."

"Jesus," Eilerson said again. "What did they find?"

"An intact Shadow ship."

Even though Susan had heard this story before, she couldn't help but shudder. Morden continued. "They pulled the IPX team out and sent us in. It was... well, it was terrifying. There were more security constraints than I'd ever seen on a site and rumors flying everywhere, that some guy had died just by touching it... and then there was the ship itself."

"What was it like?"

Morden hesitated. "Black," he finally said, "And cold. And... _wrong_. Something about it made all those deep primitive impulses you keep in the back of your head jump up and start keening at you to get out of there." After a second, he laughed slightly. "And considering what we now know about the Vorlons, that's probably not far from the truth."

"Woah, one thing at a time." Eilerson held up his hands. "Vorlons later. So this ship... there was writing on it?"

"A little, on the inside. Actually, there was a small network of caves underneath it... but we couldn't get to those until the other ship came to take it away."

"Wow."

"Yeah... we put a homing beacon on it as soon as we could. It was signaling as soon as your people got it unearthed. We tracked the beacon and started setting up an expedition to take a look..."

He trailed off. Eilerson cleared his throat. "So this was what, '55?"

"Yeah." Morden shook his head. "I didn't want to go. That ship was bad news. But you know Earthforce. Even the civilian branches get ordered around. I kept trying to negotiate, but..." He sighed. "After... the accident, there didn't seem much point."

"I guess not..." Eilerson said. He sounded stunned.

"Anyway. We got Dr. Chang and a few of his people on board because of a J/Lai dig they'd been working on. They found a Shadow artifact that wound up putting about twelve telepaths in a coma."

"Jesus!"

"Yeah. That got Earthforce moving, you can bet."

"Psi Corps, too."

"Yeah. They forced someone onto the team. We packed in a rush."

"Wow." Eilerson blinked a few times and leaned back. "So how was the trip?"

Morden grinned harshly. "Miserable. I spent most of my time locked in my cabin doing translations."

"Sounds like a good plan. Hey," Eilerson leaned forward. "Did you try out Babelgrid?"

"Max..." Morden sounded aggrieved.

"With a partial sample like that you need all the tools you can get." Eilerson was gesturing, animated for the first time in the conversation.

"No, I did not use your precious program. I was looking--"

"I don't know why you're so biased. It's not like we're living in the stone age of linguistics any more."

"I don't like your program, Max. It's haphazard."

"It's brilliant. You just won't give it a try."

"It makes assumptions that don't always turn out--"

"You should just learn to trust in technology some time."

"Maybe you should learn to appreciate the subtleties of distributed morphology."

"Maybe you should learn that Chomsky can bite me."

"I didn't use BabelGrid, and I found--"

"Version nine has two new algorithms that--"

"Similarities to Kandarian and L5, neither of which--"

"Can simplify analysis considerably--"

"Has an L'-style context-free grammar to analyze!"

"Ha!" Eilerson shouted. "Version nine has an L'' algorithm, and it can account for perturbations and inconsistencies in the general matrix. And it does Welsh."

"Yeah, yeah." Morden leaned back in his seat. "You try siccing your program on the Shadows' language sometime, and we'll see who's laughing."

"I will." Satisfied, Eilerson settled down. "So you landed on Z'Ha'dum..."

"Yeeeah," Morden said. "The Shadows made us an offer. Churlstein accepted, if that tells you anything."

"Churlstein. What an ass." Eilerson shook his head. "What happened to him?"

"The Psi Corps woman shot him."

"Oh." Eilerson looked slightly ill.

"It wasn't exactly a productive working environment."

"What happened to the people who wouldn't cooperate?"

Morden shook his head. "They were put in those ships. They... you know the Shadows used people as the processors of their ships, right? They wired people up with all sorts of brain implants and plugged them right in. It wasn't pleasant."

"So what did they want you for?"

"Diplomacy," Morden said with heavy irony. "I started wars."

"Huh," Eilerson said. "That's the opposite of diplomacy. Undiplomacy. Anti-diplomacy. Anarchosyndicalism."

"No, I was pretty much a tool of the establishment."

Eilerson laughed. "Great."

"Yeah, laugh a minute."

"How did you stand it?"

Morden grimaced. "Mostly they had me drugged up the entire time."

"Ahhh. The enough-morphozine-and-everything's-okay route?"

"Something like that. Everything was fine until Sheridan blew up the planet."

Eilerson leaned forward slightly. "So... President Sheridan really died on Z'Ha'dum? And came back to life somehow?"

"I guess so. I wasn't really paying attention at that point."

"How did you survive?"

Morden shrugged stiffly. "I don't really remember that part, either... the next thing I knew the Shadows had some of their people stitching me up. Then I was _really_ on morphozine up to my eyeballs." He smirked. "Not that it stopped them from throwing me back into the arena."

"And then you got your _head_ cut off?"

"Uh... yeah."

"Seems pretty attached now."

Morden winced. "Yeah... what do you know about Soul Hunters?"

Susan's breath caught. Galen, next to her, went "Ahhh..."

"They're a myth," Eilerson said.

"No, they're not."

"You're telling me that some immortal aliens snapped up your soul and stuck it in a jar?"

"Pretty much."

"Okay." Eilerson rubbed his eyes. "Fine. How did you get out of _that_?"

Morden frowned. "I'm not sure."

"What, another thing where you blacked out and--"

"No, I did something." Morden shook his head. "I'm just not entirely sure _what_, or _how_... I've been doing _things_ like that ever since getting out."

"Yeah. Dr. Chambers says you're not breathing."

"Well..."

"Did the Shadows do this to you?"

Morden sighed. "Yes. When I went out to see the other First Ones, they took out all the booby traps. At least, that's what they told me."

"Hah," Eilerson said softly. Then, "So the Shadows aren't controlling you any more?"

"I don't think so."

"How can you be sure?"

"Because," Morden said grimly, "If they were controlling me, I don't think I'd hate them this much."

"Touche," Eilerson muttered.

"So anyway," Morden said after a pause, "After getting away from the Soul Hunters, I borrowed a ship and went looking for some more answers. Here, actually--this planet we're orbiting. I found this database full of the history of the Shadows, all their technology, all their secrets. All their motives. I was coming back to get it, but the ship kept me asleep until you guys showed up."

"Wow," Eilerson said. "All the secrets of the Shadows."

"And most of the other First Ones, too. It's pretty thorough."

"Does it say why every sentient race has discovered Swedish Meatballs? I've always wondered about that."

Morden stared at him. "Actually, yes," he said. "There was a miscommunication. It turns out that 'Swedish meatballs' and 'telepath' are the same word in Vorlon."

Galen was making slight strangled noises. Eilerson half-laughed, then shook his head. "Wow."

"Yeah."

"So, wait," Eilerson said. "This database... it has information on _all_ the Shadows' technology? Even weapons, those sorts of things?"

Morden frowned. "You said the Drakh dropped a Shadow plague on Earth... are you telling me you still haven't found a cure?"

"No," Eilerson said, "Not yet."

Morden stared for a second, then said, "Well, if the Shadows made it, it'll be in that database."

Eilerson nodded, slowly. Then he blurted, "Aaron--are you _okay_?"

Morden froze. Softly, he said, "Getting better all the time."

Captain Gideon turned away from the screen. "We have to go down there."

"How can you be sure he's even telling the truth?" she said.

"I can't," Gideon said, cutting off Galen, who looked about to intercede. "But I have to take that chance. This is the best lead we've had about information on this plague."

"His story's as flimsy as tissue paper."

"It doesn't sound any stranger than some of the things said about Sheridan," Gideon pointed out.

The door opened, and out stepped Eilerson, looking haggard. He walked to a chair and sat down, sighing sharply.

"Well?" Galen finally asked.

"Huh?" Eilerson looked up. "Oh, it's him, all right. He's changed, but it's definitely him."

"Changed how?" Gideon asked.

Eilerson shrugged. "He's more cynical. He's actually a lot more like he was back before he met Rebecca. She turned him into a gooey-eyed optimist." He shook himself. "Sorry. I just can't believe this is real."

Gideon turned to Galen. "What did Morden mean, when he talked about doing 'things'?"

"Pardon?" the techno-mage said, projecting innocence.

"Don't 'pardon' me," Gideon said. "You know what I'm talking about. And I know you know something. Cough it up."

"You don't know anything of the sort," Galen said.

"No?"

"Wild conjecture does not count as knowledge, Matthew."

"You said that Morden came looking for the techno-mages to work with the Shadows. Why?"

Galen shrugged. "They were looking for all the support they could get."

"And yet you also said the Vorlons and the techno-mages have never gotten along. Why is that?"

"We don't take orders well," Galen said. "From anybody."

"Especially not former allies? Or enemies?"

"Techno-mages make it a point not to have enemies." Galen smiled nastily. "At least, not for long."

Gideon glared. "Do you have any idea what he's capable of?"

"Some, perhaps, based on study and interpolation. A lower limit."

"Do you think it's safe to use him as a guide?"

Galen's eyes widened in surprise. He looked over at the cell, then back at the captain. "Well. I don't believe it's any more dangerous than leaving him locked in here."

* * *

Matthew Gideon was not having a good day. 

"So who is he?" Dureena asked as she dogged his heels back to the bridge.

"Hm?" he said noncommittally. They stepped into the bridge, and Matheson nimbly removed himself from Matt's chair. "Matheson, how's that surface scan coming?"

"Slowly," the lieutenant replied. "There's some odd atmospheric disturbance. But we're picking up a lot of forests, animal life, and some structures."

"Any signs of inhabitants?"

"No, sir. None moving, anyway. And no active power sources."

"I _said_," Dureena said, "Who is this guy? The one from the transport?"

"Not now, Dureena," he said, stalling.

"Oh?" She tilted her head sideways, challenging. "And why not now? You've started preparations for landing. I can only assume this guy told you something."

"We're going to have a meeting in five minutes. You can ask questions then. In the meantime...?"

"Captain, you can't leave me out of the loop like this."

He really didn't want to admit out loud in front of the bridge crew that they were working with a former Shadowminion. And he didn't want to be the one to break that news to Dureena, who was prone to violent outbursts of temperament, and whose planet had been a victim of the Shadow Planet Killer in the final days of the Shadow War.

Dureena also carried knives. Lots of them. Sharp ones.

All of this ran through Matt's mind as he sighed and said, "Fine. Conference room. Matheson?"

"Sir?"

"You should hear this, too." And he wanted backup in case Dureena went for his throat.

Dureena sat, very quiet and very still as he gave his explanation. She remained very quiet and still as Matheson said, "That still doesn't explain why he was on a _Vorlon_ ship."

"No," Matt said. "It doesn't. But if that database has information on how to stop the plague, I'm willing to hold off and get the rest of the answers later."

Dureena still wasn't saying anything. This was worrisome.

Matheson cleared his throat. "Can you be sure he's telling the truth?"

"No." Matt wanted to pace. He restrained himself by remembering that he didn't want to present Dureena with a good target. "But we've gone into situations as dangerous, or worse, for leads that weren't this good. This is a chance to get our hands on actual Shadow technology, information straight from the source."

"Or it could be a trap," Dureena finally said.

He was startled, but grateful her first contribution wasn't an edged weapon. "We'll be careful. I'll discuss the full containment procedures when everyone else gets here."

"Including Morden."

The edge in her voice was almost inaudible. "Dureena, we need his help."

"No we don't." She jumped to her feet and came around the table at him. "No, we don't need his help. We don't need his interference. We can find this thing ourselves if we need to. We can look somewhere else. We can take apart his ship for information. But we do not. Need. Him."

"Dureena--"

"This man _destroyed my planet_, Gideon!"

"No he didn't, Dureena," Matt said, holding up his hands. "The Shadows did that."

"It's the same thing!"

"No, it isn't. Galen says--"

"Oh, Galen says, Galen thinks he knows everything!" Dureena was up on her toes, shaking in fury. "Galen can forgive anyone, Galen can talk about temperance, Galen never had his entire _race_ wiped out by the Shadows--"

"You would be surprised," Galen's clear, even voice cut through hers.

Dureena turned too sharply, fell back against the table. Galen watched solemnly as she picked herself up and struggled to regain her composure. Matt was shocked, more than anything. Dureena wasn't prone to falling over, ever.

"The techno-mages are in hiding," she growled. "You told me that."

"True," he said. "But we have more in common with your people than it first appears. We have lost all we had, save our lives. And we are slowly losing those, to time, to age, to our exile from our places of power. We have all lost loved ones, homes, and families because of the Shadow War. Because of the Shadows."

She shook her head once, sharply. "How can you defend him, then?"

"By recognizing that Morden himself has been scarred by his experiences. That he was not in control of his actions. That the Shadows did him wrong as they did us."

Dureena stared at him, breathing hard. Then she shoved her hands under her arms and stalked to a corner, putting her back against the wall and glaring at the opposite doorway.

Eilerson, who stepped through the opposite doorway a moment later, was brought up short. "What happened?"

Matt cleared his throat. "I broke the news."

"Ah." Eilerson shook his head distractedly and found a seat. "Ah." Dureena didn't seem to notice him.

Ivanova was less fazed. "I see we've found another fan," she said as she took a chair.

"Yes," Galen said. "Dureena's judge of character has often been described as 'swift and merciless.'"

"I've heard some stories."

Dureena suddenly stood up straight, arms dropping to her sides. Matt turned to see Dr. Chambers entering, followed by Morden. A pair of guards stopped just outside the door.

Morden nodded. "Captain." Some of his suaveness seemed to have worn off, after his conversation with Eilerson. But he was still remarkably composed as Dureena charged around the table and stopped almost eye to eye with him.

"You're the one," she said.

"Yes..." Morden said, confused.

"Do you remember Zander Prime?"

His eyes widened, slightly. "Oh."

"Oh. You do remember."

Matt hadn't believed she would actually stab him. If he had seriously considered the idea, he wouldn't have let Dureena get within ten feet of Morden. Certainly not within arm's reach.

There was an electric buzz and sudden smell of ozone as Dureena's long flint knife stopped midair, its tip just grazing the front of Morden's jacket. Dureena grimaced and twisted her arm helplessly as Morden slowly backed away.

"Dammit, Galen!" she yelled.

Morden cleared his throat. "It wouldn't have done much good anyway."

Dureena stared at him, then dropped the knife. It fell to the floor with a clatter as she turned and stormed out the door.

"That could have gone worse," Eilerson offered.

Morden turned to glance at him. "Not by too much." He bent to retrieve the knife, looked it over, then shrugged and put it on the table.

"Well," Matt said, trying to regain control. "After that introduction I think we'd better get down to business before she comes back with a sledgehammer."

The meeting passed quickly. Morden pointed out on the map approximately where the site was, and Matheson had their sensors confirm there was a large group of structures there. Everyone agreed to take the virus screen nanites before landing. At the first sign of trouble, they'd leave. Morden had the good grace to only point out once that the entire planet was deserted, and he only looked politely exasperated as Matt went over the precautions.

Dureena showed up again at the virus screening. She wouldn't meet his eyes. She very pointedly didn't look at Morden. Even Galen didn't make smart remarks in her direction, merely handed her back her knife.

The shuttle ride down to the surface was chilly to the point of being arctic.

They landed in a temperate forest, outside of a vast, decaying metropolis of a native stone which looked like white marble. The local plants had taken over long ago. Morden looked at the rubble and squinted. "It's just a few blocks that way," he said, pointing southwest into the city.

"Impressive," Matt admitted, absently fingering his PPG.

"What I want to know," Galen said, eyeing the ground, "Is why my old ship was here." He turned an aggrieved expression on Morden.

"Ah," Morden said. "Sorry. The Vorlons blew it up."

Galen stared at him for a few seconds with a blank expression on his face. "You're going to have to back up a bit and explain slowly."

"Well, you were going to have it self-destruct," Morden said reasonably. "So the Shadows captured it, put in in parking orbit around the next planet in, and forgot about it when they left the galaxy. I borrowed it for a while."

Galen nodded slowly. "And then the Vorlons... blew it up."

"I guess it seemed like a good idea at the time."

Galen shook his head and turned toward the city. After a moment Matt started after him.

The streets were wide, paved in stone, and threaded with vines and small plants that had pushed their way up through the cracks. Large plants, in some cases. But there was a path, down which Morden led them, winding around the worst deadfalls and through a couple of the massive buildings, whose roofs had long fallen in, trees in place of columns jutting toward the vaulted sky.

Matt was surprised when Dureena slipped past him to walk beside Morden. He wondered if he should forcibly separate them. Then he wondered exactly what sort of forcible separation would work. Before he could frame a plan, Dureena broke the ice. By talking, not violence.

"So you remember Zander Prime."

Matt backed off slightly. She sounded resigned to Morden living, which was about all he was going to ask for the moment.

Morden looked at her askance. "You're trying to get something from me. What?"

She shrugged, shortly. "Admission? Guilt? Some sort of sign that you realize what happened to me? To my world?"

"You want an apology." His voice was flat with disbelief. "You want me to apologize for destroying your planet."

"That would be a good start!"

He half-laughed, a high, pained sound. "I... oh, God."

She kept walking, back unnaturally stiff. "You could just say it."

"No. No I can't. It wouldn't mean anything. No, listen," as she stepped towards him angrily. "It's too big. I can't... I can't comprehend it. Apologizing would be meaningless. It's just too big."

"I can sure as hell comprehend it!"

"I'm not saying..." Morden shook his head. "Listen, okay? There was a library, on my world, three thousand years ago. Alexandria. It held hundreds of thousands of texts, literature, philosophy, history, myth, poetry... all the culture of an entire continent. And it was destroyed in a civil war. Demolished. There wasn't anywhere else that knowledge was secure, and most of it was lost. Over the next three thousand years we've pieced together maybe a hundred texts, with another hundred fragments... but the rest is gone.

"I can't... _know_ that. I grew up on that stuff. I learned Greek just so I could read the Oresteia in the original. But I can't really conceive that there was so much there, and so much lost. I don't know what it means to lose that much history.

"And now you're asking me to... to try and apologize, because your world, everything, not just one nation, or three, but every story, every song, every tradition of your planet has been reduced to _you_? There's nothing remotely graspable about that!"

They walked in silence for a while. Matt almost thought it was the end of the conversation when Dureena said, "That's not enough."

"I know it isn't. What do you _want_?"

Dureena stopped walking. She looked into Morden's eyes and said sharply, "I want you to hurt. I want you to burn. I want you to have nightmares every night for the rest of your life, about what you did to us. To me. To everyone you ever hurt."

Morden, with a kind of quiet dignity, replied, "That, you can already be assured of."

Matt realized he'd also stopped, forced himself to walk past them very quietly. He felt uncomfortable. Their footsteps started up again after a moment.

Dead leaves were thick underfoot. The sky was a brilliant blue. The only sounds were footfalls and the occasional calls between security teams. No birds, no animals.

"We're almost there," Morden said on his left.

Matt looked up. Morden was the picture of serenity itself. "So... you found this thing," he asked.

"Yes."

"You were living here?"

Morden shrugged. "For a while. I'd been looking at a few other abandoned First Ones colonies before this one, but this one looked like it was the oldest. And it turned out to be the most interesting."

"Interesting?" His sense of trepidation wasn't being helped by this conversation. "Interesting how?"

"Data. Information. Old stories that come together." At Matt's look, Morden sighed. "Look, every time I try to put together the sentences, it sounds like a bad conspiracy theory. Which it is. I'd rather you get it from the source and not consider me completely off my rocker before I hand it over."

"That inspires so much confidence," Matt said, as Morden stepped up to a rather more complete building and pushed the door open.

Here were signs of habitation. A cot was shoved into the far corner, a bookshelf on the opposite wall was covered in trinkets, small artifacts. And just inside the door was a desk, and on the desk was a black... box.

Everything except the box was covered in a thin layer of dust. Morden crossed to the bookshelf and picked up a small glass sphere which he absently polished and stuck in his pocket. Then he pointed to the box. "That's it," he said unnecessarily.

'It' was completely featureless, shining slickly in the sunlight that leaked in through holes in the roof. Matt stared at it for a few seconds, then got up his nerve and touched it.

Nothing happened. It was cool to his touch, and felt like nothing more than extruded plastic. "Well," he said, drawing back his hand. "Does it talk?"

"Sort of." Morden shrugged. "You can access it with the right hardware."

"Oh. Great." Matt gestured at the giant paperweight. "Would you care to demonstrate?"

Morden stared at him for a moment, then reached out and rested his hand on the featureless surface.

'I hope I didn't just do something incredibly stupid,' Matt had time to think before a holographic display snapped into existence above the database. Alien writing glowed on a dark background, a bulleted list of scratch marks that could have been either a table of contents or a grocery list.

"Max?" he said.

Eilerson stepped forward, leaned in to study the characters, then shook his head. "I don't recognize the characters."

"Maybe you should sic your shiny new software on them," Morden said, smirking.

"I _will_, thank you," Eilerson said.

"A recorded history of the... builders of bridges, I think," Galen said.

"The complete record of the culture, achievements, and history of the Shipwrights and their associates," Morden corrected him. "But I'm impressed."

Galen glared at him. "That doesn't say Shipwrights," he said.

"No, but it's the shortened form of the real name of the Shadows, which translates better as Shipwrights than anything else."

"Builders of bridges?"

"That's another way of looking at it." Morden pointed at one of the menu items, and the screen shifted. He paged through a few more screens before backing away again. "There you go. Nanoviral plague."

And there it was, sparkling in the air in front of them.

Matt cleared his throat. "Okay. We're going to put this thing, and us, through quarantine. And then we're going to translate this file. And then we're going to use it to save the world."

* * *

Susan stepped back onto the bridge of the Diomedes with a sigh of relief. If the crew of the Excalibur wanted to bring back something a former Shadow minion had suggested to them, that was fine, but part of the agreement was that she be on her ship when it came back, just in case everyone on the Excalibur got infected with something nasty and died. 

"Captain," Elle Jones, the only civilian on the bridge, greeted her. "We've got the targeting system working again. Mostly."

Elle was the Diomedes' weapons designer. And chief tester. And general go-to girl when something broke. Which was more often than Susan cared to admit.

"Well, that's good," she said. "Better than pointing the ship in the right direction and catching everything in the spread, anyway." When Elle didn't answer, she repeated, "Right?"

"Well, yes, it's slightly better than that."

Susan sighed.

"You know, it's really exciting to see the Excalibur," Elle said. "Fascinating design. Three fusion phased-plasma generators of that size, with the gravitational lensing caused by the engines... yes, it's impressive how they managed to put it all together, keeping the bridge centrally located and away from the energy generation, excellent cooling systems, a very efficient design." She nodded absently for a few seconds while Susan relaxed in her chair. "Still looks like a giant strap-on, though."

Susan looked up sharply. "Sorry, what?"

"A strap-on. You know, something you put on with a leather harness so you can do your boyfriend up the ass. Or girlfriend. Whatever."

Susan put her hand over her eyes. Trevor, her second-in-command, was just standing there snickering, she knew it. "Jones, what have I said about proper decorum on the bridge of a military vessel?"

"Oh? Sorry, was I talking about sex again?"

"You're _always_ talking about sex." She looked over at Trevor, who was trying not to grin. "Lieutenant Commander, what's local time in Tuzanor?"

"Oh-nine-thirty, Captain."

He didn't even have to look it up. She stood. "I have to make a call. Don't blow up the plasma grid while my back is turned."

The plasma grid was Elle's pride and joy, a weapon that somehow, through rotating ionized plasma in a way that Susan couldn't explain or comprehend, was able to kill the engines of any ships using gravimetric propulsion. The problem was that so far it had either worked too well or not well enough. The targeting system was flaky. It had worked perfectly in the dockyard, and in organized tests, but not, so far, in the field.

Her office was just off the bridge. It wasn't very large, but it allowed her to make calls in private. And this was a call that needed privacy.

After a few minutes seeking a connection, John Sheridan's face appeared on her screen. "Susan!" he said, grinning. "It's good to hear from you. It's been too long."

She smiled. His grin was infectious, and it was good to see him again. "I know. And I wish this call wasn't about business."

"What's happening?"

For a moment, Susan reflected that it would probably be better for her career if she finished up her report to Earthforce before saying anything to John. Hell with it. "I'm going to have to give you this linearly, because if I hit the highlights it won't make any sense. Hell, it doesn't make much sense in order, either, but at least that way you won't be any more confused than we are."

"Okay."

"We found a Vorlon transport."

John started to croak something in disbelief, but Susan plowed over him. "Since the Diomedes is still a prototype, I wanted some backup, so I called in the Excalibur. Captain Gideon agreed to help. We made contact, and the ship wanted to dock and turn over its passenger." She paused. "I'd gone over to the Excalibur so we could communicate better, so I was there when the ship docked."

"Who was on it?"

She really tried to just give a straight answer, but couldn't bring herself to say Morden's name without a warning, first. "Well, who's the last person you'd expect to be on a Vorlon transport?"

John didn't bother guessing. He just visibly braced himself and said, "Who?"

"Mr. Morden."

"That's impossible."

"I know."

"He's _dead!"_

"I know." She shrugged. "Apparently things got complicated. We threw him in the brig, and he cooperated... to a point. His story's pretty incomplete in parts. But he found some sort of Shadow database that theoretically has information on the plague in it. And the crew of the Excalibur have just gone down to retrieve it."

Sheridan stared at her for a few seconds, then said, "They're trusting his word?"

"Gideon says it's worth it. And the techno-mage with him, Galen, says that Morden checks out. But I'm still worried. Morden said that the Shadows... did something to him. They modified him when they picked him up after you nuked Z'Ha'dum. By his own admission, they turned him into some kind of weapon. I don't trust this situation."

John looked profoundly unhappy. She didn't blame him. Finally, he said, "It's Gideon's call. He has to make the decision. And billions of lives will be saved if he's right."

"I know."

"The First Ones promised noninterference."

"I know."

John sighed. "I'll keep in contact with Captain Gideon. Thanks for letting me know about this. I know it's not exactly the normal chain of reporting."

She shrugged. "If Gideon manages to get us all killed with this stunt, I want someone to know about it."

John nodded and signed off. Susan sighed. She was going to catch shit for this, she knew it. But she had a greater responsibility to the entire galaxy if the Shadows were getting involved again.

Her link chirped. "Yes?" she answered.

"Captain, the Excalibur just called to say that their people are back from the surface," Trevor said. "They're in quarantine until Dr. Chambers can finish checking them out."

"Wonderful. Keep me informed." She tapped her link off and sighed again.

"Like I said," Morden said from behind her.

She was on her feet with her PPG pointed at his stomach before her brain finished processing his voice. He looked down at her gun with unhurried concern and then back up at her. "Please don't," he said.

Her mind was spinning. Morden shouldn't be--he was on the Excalibur, with the team, _in quarantine_--"How did you get in here?" was what she managed to ask. All things considered, she reflected a moment later, it was a pretty good question.

"I can teleport." He smirked at something, probably her expression. "What, didn't I mention that?"

She raised her PPG to shoulder level, pointed at his head. From this distance she could plaster that smirk across three feet of bulkhead. "What are you doing here?"

Morden sighed, looking sadly down the barrel of the weapon. "No, you're right. This really isn't helping." He shook his head and pulled a datacrystal out from inside his jacket. "Actually, someone wanted me to give you a message."

"A message." She stared at the crystal. He held it out, watching her expression. "Someone wanted you to give me a message. Who?"

He caught her gaze, held her eyes for a moment before answering. "No, you already don't trust me. Just a guess, but it's probably better if you find that out yourself."

"Why didn't you give it to me earlier?"

"Because, and this is another guess, mind you, I think the contents are personal. Not something you want Captain Gideon watching over your shoulder."

She didn't react. He nodded again and set the crystal gently on her desk. She looked down at it for a moment, and when she looked back he was gone.

Her hands were shaking, now.

She shoved her PPG back in its holster and picked up the crystal. Its surface was slightly warm under her fingers. It was real. She hadn't been hallucinating.

She wanted to bring up her link and call Trevor and have him go over the ship with a security team. She wanted to call Gideon and ask if Morden had been seen leaving the Excalibur, or if he was still there in quarantine.

She wanted to know what was on that crystal.

Her datapad was on the desk, and it was capable of playing video. Normally she watched messages on the screen, but there was no way she was plugging a crystal that Morden gave her into her ship. She grabbed the pad, inserted the crystal and cued up the video.

Talia's face. She nearly dropped the screen.

"Susan. I know you might not trust this message... or the messenger." Talia's mouth twisted in a rueful smile. "But it's the best I can do. If I could come back myself, I would. Please believe that. Please believe... that this is me, Susan. Really me. I'm back. She couldn't kill me. The Psi Corps didn't destroy me. I'm really here."

Susan had stopped breathing. She started again. It hurt.

"I don't have much time, and there's so much I want to say... Oh, Susan..."

She was _not_ going to cry.

"I don't know when this will get to you, or even if it will, but... I wanted to say goodbye. She took everything away from me, and hurt you, and I never got to say goodbye. I never got to say thank you. I never got to say I'm sorry..."

Talia's face was blurring in the screen. Dammit. Damn it.

"I never got to say I love you."

Susan blinked the tears away, tugged at the stubborn ones with her sleeve. Talia was losing her composure, smiling bravely through her own tears. "I love you, and I wish..." She wiped her eyes with her fingers, and they came away glittering. "I love you. Goodbye, Susan. Goodbye."

The screen went black. It reflected her own face back at her, and what she saw there made her close her eyes and put the datapad down, away from her, on her desk.

When she'd regained her composure, she pulled the crystal and shoved it in her pocket.

There were really only two options. Either the message was genuine, or it had been faked. And even her cynicism wasn't vast enough to believe in a conspiracy so large that it could manage that. The message had been Talia. The real Talia. Her Talia.

She made up her mind quickly. She left her office and returned to the bridge. "Enners?"

Trevor was already at attention. "Yes, Captain?"

"Prep the shuttle; I'm going back to the Excalibur."

He blinked at her. "You've only been back twenty minutes, Captain."

"I know. But I need to discuss some things with their team that can't go over an open channel."

His eyes narrowed. They'd been working together for three years now, and they trusted each other... but he hadn't been in Earthforce when Clark was in power, had never had to make those kind of decisions. He was tactful enough not to mention Sheridan's name out loud, but it was obvious that he thought she owed him an explanation.

Maybe she did; she wasn't going to give him one yet, though. 'When I get back,' she silently promised.

Lieutenant Matheson met her in the docking bay. "Are they out of quarantine yet?" she asked as he led her to the core shuttle.

"Dr. Chambers is finishing her analysis. It won't be long."

Her mouth was dry as she took a seat. Desperate, she searched for a topic of conversation. "So... you're a telepath." Boy did that sound stupid. More scrambling. "I met a military liason teep once who always wanted to be a pilot. I wonder if he's got the chance to now."

"What was his name?" Matheson asked politely.

She had to search for it. He hadn't exactly made the best impression on her. "Harriman Gray."

The lieutenant shook his head. "I never met him. I was just a P-5."

P-5 to Talia. Again. "What branch of the Corps did you work in?"

He looked away. "Investigations."

"Investi--" it hit her halfway through. Psi Cops. "Oh."

He shrugged stiffly. "They always told us we were doing the right thing. It wasn't until it was almost too late that I realized... they were wrong."

The shuttle hissed to a stop before she could respond. She hoped that Matheson couldn't tell how hard she was mentally kicking herself as she followed him into the hallway.

Gideon was pulling his jacket on outside the quarantine zone. Dureena was behind a screen opposite Dr. Chambers, getting poked in the arm with a remotely operated needle and being arrogantly stoic about it. Gideon looked up in surprise as she entered. "Captain. I thought you wanted to stay away in case we accidentally blew up the ship."

The last thing she wanted to deal with, just at this moment, was bullshit machismo. "I just put in a call to President Sheridan to update him on the situation. If, indeed, we all go up in flames."

Gideon's eyes narrowed. "And what did the President have to say?"

"That it's your call, of course, but he appreciated being informed."

He relaxed, slightly. "Good."

"Did you find anything down there?"

"The database was there, just like he said," Gideon said, pointing to a separate room. Susan looked over. Through the windows she could see a table, upon which sat a featureless black slab, like a tiny monolith on its side.

"He pulled up some information. It's got data on the plague in there, all right."

"My friend has a name, you know," Eilerson said, butting into the conversation from Gideon's left.

"Yeah, your friend," Susan said darkly. "Where is Morden, anyway?"

Dr. Chambers answered. "We put him in separate quarantine, to keep an eye on him. And because it'll take me six hours to make heads or tails of his test results anyway."

"Do you think he's contaminated with anything?"

The doctor shrugged. "Nobody else was, so I don't see why he would be."

"Then you wouldn't mind if I had a word with him in private."

Gideon was staring at her. She didn't care. Dr. Chambers was also staring, which was more immediate. "No... there shouldn't be a problem."

"Why?" Gideon exclaimed.

"I have some questions for him." While Gideon groped for a response, Susan walked over to the quarantine booth, gestured at the door, and asked Dr. Chambers, "May I?"

The door was closing behind her before Gideon could form a coherent objection, and for the second time in as many hours she was facing Mr. Morden alone.

The room was tiny. There wasn't room for a chair, or a table; nothing to give distance. He stood there, staring at her in mild surprise until she asked, "Do you know if they're recording sound in here?"

That surprised him, too. "Yes, but..." He looked up, briefly. "Not any more. They can't hear us."

She took a deep breath. "Does anyone _else_ know you can teleport?"

Morden looked out the window at the rest of the lab. It wasn't a very big window, really. "I don't think so. If anyone was paying attention and noticed, they're keeping quiet about it." He grinned sheepishly. "Actually, that was only the second time I've done that. The first time I broke my arm, which would have completely spoiled my entrance."

The crystal was in her pocket. She pulled it out, resisting the urge to clench it in her fist. "Where did you get this?"

His gaze went to the crystal, stayed there. "Out where the First Ones are."

She sighed sharply, frustrated. He shook his head. "Believe me, that's all I can say."

"Do you know what kind of an answer that is?"

"Yes," he snapped angrily. It brought her up short. He looked away, shoulders tense. "Next question."

There was an emotional taste in the back of her mouth, as though she'd swallowed blood. Carefully, she asked, "Why?"

He didn't look up. "Because she asked me to."

"That's not..."

"Because she asked me to. Because she said she wanted to say goodbye to someone and hadn't gotten the chance. Because I know what that's like."

He was being carefully neutral. His voice was flat, even, controlled. But he still wouldn't look up.

"What..." Once she started thinking the question, she couldn't keep from saying it. "What exactly did the Shadows offer you?"

His head snapped up, and she was caught in his eyes. She shouldn't have asked. She had no business asking.

'His eyes are blue,' she thought dazedly, trying to think of something other than the sinking feeling in her stomach. 'I've seen blue like that before, somewhere...'

"The Io jumpgate bombing," he said slowly. "In '56. My wife and daughter were on the transport. They found no survivors."

"The ship was almost through the jumpgate," she whispered.

He nodded, jerkily. "I couldn't... they could have been alive. I didn't know. Six months. I didn't know."

The sinking feeling had hit bottom and was turning to ice.

"The Shadows showed me... they knew where the rest of the ship was. They knew hyperspace better than anyone. They don't even need jump points. They showed me the transport. They were still alive. They were caught... they were s-suffering..."

He gritted his teeth and looked away again. Susan forced herself to breathe. 'I didn't know,' she told herself. 'I didn't know. They were declared casualties. We couldn't find anything...'

"I don't... know," Morden finally said, "If they were lying. I still don't. But I can believe now that they're dead."

There was nothing she could say. He stood there, not a foot away, carefully not looking in her direction. She couldn't think of anything to do.

The fingers in her right hand started tingling, complaining of falling asleep. She looked down. She had been clenching Talia's message in her fist.

"Thank you, for..." He looked at her, and again she stumbled. "For the message."

He stared for a moment. "You're welcome." Polite again. Distant.

"I thought I was the only one who did that," she said.

"Sorry?"

'I said that out loud. Shit.' "I... never mind. I need to get some sleep."

Now she was babbling. He was watching her, his expression worried, but not unkind. "You do that."

She nodded, and stuck the crystal back in her pocket before leaving.

Gideon was waiting for her when she came out. Irritated, he pointed at her and snapped, "I want an explanation."

She ignored him, and looked around for Galen. The techno-mage was standing nearby, practicing being inscrutable. "Galen, you said you had a baseline estimate of Morden's abilities," she said.

"Yes, but it's more of a guess, really." he replied.

"Did your 'guess' include teleportation?"

Galen stared at her. "Include what?"

"I'm sorry," Gideon butted in, "Teleportation? As in--"

"Because he _can_," Susan said over him, "So it's not really worth it to keep him locked up anywhere. He's cooperating for his own reasons, not ours."

She turned on her heel and left. Someone fell in beside her to guide her back to her shuttle. She pinched the bridge of her nose to try and stave off a sinus headache.

'I thought I was the only one who...'

'Everyone hurts, Susetchka. And everyone has to pretend the pain doesn't exist.'

* * *

Earthforce quarantine procedure was to keep all organic technology in scanned lockdown for two weeks. Not having any better ideas, Matt followed the regulations to the letter. 

It was like pulling teeth.

He composed an elaborate excuse to send to his superiors in Earthforce, explaining that he was in the middle of a situation of some delicacy and he'd be sending a full report when there was confirmed news. He organized a meeting with the captains of the two Whitestars that showed up soon after Ivanova's call to Sheridan. He decided, after the rather amicable meeting, that he wasn't as mad at Ivanova as he thought he was. He invited her over for dinner to try and apologize.

"You guys definitely have better supplies than we do," she commented as he put the finishing touches on the pasta. "Smells great."

"Well, it's a matter of space," he said. "We get enough cargo room for food to even keep the civilians happy."

"Mmm. Even if this will keep me on the treadmill a bit," she said as he hauled the dishes over.

He rolled his eyes. "C'mon, relax." In his best Jewish-mother impression, he continued, "Put some meat on your bones, I don't know what they put in those synthetics, but it cannot be as good as real food..."

"Hey, I'm the Jew here. Leave the mothering to me." She was smiling, anyway. That was a good start. "My people suffered for thousands of years to learn that guilt trip."

"What, and you won't share it?"

"Never." Ivanova grinned. "We have to keep something after Earthdome nationalized the International Banking Conspiracy."

He chuckled. She relaxed a bit more. "So. Any idea what's in that database yet?"

"Not much." He shook his head. "Mr. Morden made it show us a few images when we were on the planet, but when we got it back up here we wanted to put it under observation. So I've basically decided to just follow Earthforce quarantine regs for organic technology."

"Good idea." She took a bite, chewed thoughtfully. "Nice."

"Thank you."

"From what I've seen of this stuff," she continued, "it's better to be safe than sorry. I remember one time an archaeologist slipped some organic technology through B5 customs, and two days later his assistant was covered in bio-armor and blowing holes in the station."

"Wow."

"Yeah. Good old IPX."

He hummed, thinking of Eilerson. Yeah, good old IPX.

After a few minutes he asked, "You must have seen a lot of pretty impressive things on B5, huh?"

"Yes, it was quite a posting. Well, you must have some stories yourself." She smiled inquiringly. "You were on an explorer-class ship before taking this job, weren't you?"

"Yeah, the EAS Explorer. Named before anyone in Earthforce had any creativity."

"Were you always in the explorations division?"

"No, I was..." He searched for diplomacy. "Forcibly transferred after what happened to the Cerberus."

She frowned. "What happened?"

"We were out in the Lanep system, just routine outer-sector patrol, when we were fired on." He grimaced, remembering. "The screens couldn't see anything and we couldn't tell at first what had happened, so my team was sent outside to take a look at the damage. Then... the ship started running. I couldn't tell what was going in, so I radioed in... all I could hear was panic and orders to get out. Nobody heard me. And that's when I saw the ship."

"What was it?"

He realized he'd stopped talking, looked up at Ivanova's concern, decided he'd rather stare at his plate. "I still don't know. But it took out the Cerberus in just a couple shots."

"A Shadow ship?"

"No, no... I've seen footage of those. This was different. And it wasn't a Drakh ship, either."

"Well," she said, "the Shadows did have other allies. We don't know much about all of them."

"Yeah. All I know is I won't forget that thing any time soon." He sighed. "When I got back to Earth, nobody would believe me about the ship. They said it was probably a jump engine malfunction."

"Mmm, I've heard that one before."

"So when I wouldn't play along, they decided I needed some 'rest' and transferred me. I served on the Cortez for a while, worked my way up through the ranks, and eventually got the Explorer."

"The Cortez." She grinned. "So you served under Captain Maynard, then."

"Yeah. You know him?"

"He stopped by B5 for a resupply once. He and Sheridan are really good friends."

"Jeez, does Sheridan know _everyone_? I keep running into people. I mean, he and Captain Lochley were _married_ once, if you can believe that." He paused. "Did you ever meet her?"

"Once. I gave her custody of my coffee plants. And she took my quarters, of course."

"That was YOUR bed?" he choked. After a moment he realized what he'd just said. "... Shoot. Sorry."

She raised an eyebrow. "Well, glad it's done somebody some good."

So much for diplomacy. She was smirking, though. So he hadn't lost too many points.

"So, uh..."

"Galen trusts Morden. Why?"

The sharp conversational left turn took him aback. "I don't know why. I suppose he has his reasons." He shrugged. "It could be just what he said, that he believes that the Shadows aren't controlling him any more."

"But..."

"But techno-mages never tell anyone the whole story."

Ivanova sighed. He frowned. "You said Morden can teleport. How exactly did you confirm this?"

"Oh." She sighed again. "He showed up in my office."

"Oh, great."

"Yeah. I don't know. Maybe there is something to his story."

"What, because he can teleport?"

"Because if he wanted to cause a lot of damage," she pointed out, "he could. And he isn't."

"The innocent-by-lack-of-damage-so-far theory?"

"It's something to keep in mind." She looked grim. "A lot of people were victimized in that war. By the Shadows, the Vorlons, the Psi Corps, Nightwatch..."

"Well, Dureena still blames him for wasting her homeworld."

Ivanova shook her head. "I don't know. He's cooperating. I hope that means he isn't planning on screwing us over later."

With that reassuring conversation in mind he let Morden out of holding. That was scary. He worried for the rest of the day that he'd find one of Dureena's knives in his back for his decision. But if what Ivanova said was true, there was no use penning him in anyway. Matt had the former Shadowminion shown to guest quarters and asked Galen to keep an eye on him.

Eilerson took this as tacit allowance to haul Morden down to the dining hall, which counted as the best meeting and workspace on the ship, to talk his ear off and ask for opinions on the languages they'd encountered so far. Matt thought about calling him on it, but let it go. The archaeologist was anxious to get his hands on the archive. They all were.

Two weeks was an unbearably long time.

Five days in Matt was lounging in the dining hall, keeping an eye on Morden across the room, when Dr. Chambers walked in and stopped across from the Shadowminion. The place was quiet, so it was pretty easy to eavesdrop.

"Mr. Morden?"

Morden looked up from his data pad, surprised. "Yes?"

Sarah sat down, facing away from Matt and blocking his view of Morden. He shifted his chair sideways a bit. "I have a sort of request," she said.

"A sort of request?" Morden was amused. "Well, I might be a sort of help. What can I do for you, doctor?"

"A while ago, we met an alien... rescued him, really. He was being hunted by his own people. They lived under an oppressive regime which was systematically destroying all the art their culture had created. Did Eilerson tell you about this?"

Morden shrugged slightly. "He mentioned it." A brief smile. "Sort of."

Sarah relaxed a bit. "Well, he had a copy of everything that got destroyed. Or... most of it, anyway. What he could save. He had us make a copy of his crystals."

"Ah?"

"It's.. wonderful. What I can understand, anyway." She spread her hands. "Thing is, Max's translations are... I'm wondering if he missed some subtleties somewhere. In the poetry. It's all a bit sparse."

"I could see that." Morden stared at her, eyes narrowed. "Why ask me? Why not just bully Max until he does the job right?"

Sarah half-laughed. "Well, first of all, I heard your arguments over subtleties of translation." Morden winced slightly. "Second, Dureena tells me you have an impressive appreciation for culture... as she put it, more than you'd expect from someone in your line of work."

"My old line of work," he said tiredly. "Is there a thirdly?"

"Yes." Matt couldn't see Sarah's face, but he knew her wry smile. "Thirdly, I looked up some of your articles, and I saw your piece on Anfras love poetry."

"Ah." Morden looked off into the middle distance, somewhere over Sarah's left shoulder. "That. Hm."

"Fourthly, we've got nine days until the quarantine ends, and it's something to do."

He chuckled. "Best reason yet. Okay, I'll take a look. No promises I'll have anything by the time quarantine is up, though."

Sarah left to get the relevant crystals. Morden went back to scribbling on Eilerson's notes. Matt decided it would be a good time to go back to the bridge and pretend that something interesting was happening.

As a matter of fact, something was. The chief weapons tester on the Diomedes had talked one of the Whitestar crews into being the test subject for the Diomedes' prototype weapon. Matheson explained this as Matt watched the Whitestar make a few graceful banks and rolls, then suddenly stop maneuvering and just coast in a straight line for about half a minute.

Matheson checked their instruments. "That's nice. They didn't hit _us_ that time."

Matt stared at him. "Wouldn't I have noticed if they'd killed our gravity drive? I mean, that's our gravity, right?"

"Not exactly, sir. It only affects exterior gravimetric field projections. Our internal fields aren't damaged in any way."

Matt considered. "Well. That's useful. Gives your enemy a chance to surrender without puking his guts out from spacesickness."

"One can only hope."

"Excalibur, this is the Diomedes," Ivanova's voice came over the comm. "We have a request..." she hesitated. "Ms. Jones wonders..." Another hesitation. "Elle wants to try it on the Vorlon ship. I've told her it's a bad idea, and she insists on asking. Would you mind inquiring of your guest if he'd be willing to set his ship up for target practice?"

Matt exchanged a long look with his XO. "I can go..." Matheson started to offer.

"No, I'll do it. I know where he is." He signaled his intent to speak to comms. "Roger, Diomedes. We'll request it."

There was a pile of crystals by Morden's elbow when Matt returned. "Mr. Morden?"

"Mmm-hmm?" Morden said without looking up from his pad.

'We now have two people on board with Eilerson's work habits. Great.' "The chief weapons engineer for the Diomedes would like to use your ship."

"What for?"

"As a target."

Morden looked up incredulously.

"They've got a non-destructive gravity drive nullifier of some kind. Perfectly harmless. They've hit the Excalibur by accident a couple times and we're fine."

"Interesting." Morden shrugged. "But why ask me? I'm not the one getting shot at. Ask the ship."

"Uhh..." That was a new one. "It's your ship."

"Frankly, I think Orestes considers me 'his human'. And he definitely thinks he's smarter than I am, otherwise I wouldn't be here. Which just goes to show."

"Oh." Matt took a couple moments to digest that. "So... that really was the ship talking to us on approach, not some coded..."

"Mmm-hmm. Vorlon ships have always been sentient. Scary thought, huh?" A flash of teeth, like a predator. "Go ask Orestes. I have a feeling he'll be tickled by the request."

He mulled that thought over all the way back to the bridge. When he finally got the nerve to call the Vorlon transport and inform it that they wanted to shoot at it, he was surprised to find that Morden was right. Orestes was curious about what had been going on outside the Excalibur's hull, and was, for lack of a better word, tickled to be asked to volunteer.

After some trepidation, Matt gave Orestes clearance to launch. Then he watched with teeth gritted as the transport executed some of the same loops and rolls as the White Star had, suddenly drifting in a straight lines as the Diomedes' weapon system kicked in.

(That is a most interesting experience,) Orestes sent on an open channel.

"Captain Gideon?" came a female voice from the Diomedes. "This is Elle Jones, weapons development. We're getting some readings over here I can't quite make out, and I was wondering if I could come over there to redo this run in real time while watching your sensors."

"Uhhhh..." Matt said, mind spinning in place for a couple seconds. "Sure. Come on over." Matheson was giving him a calculatedly bland look. He shrugged.

Jones proved to be a perky twenty-something Mars-born with short, ash-blonde hair and a vulgar sense of humor. She teased Matheson and told Matt exactly what she thought his ship looked like. The tests of the Diomedes' weapon went according to her satisfaction, and when she asked for a short tour of the ship Matheson offered his services, even though he was still slightly red from Jones' last comment.

Matt watched them leave with a raised eyebrow. Well, now.

Matheson came back after an hour to report that Ms. Jones was on her way back to the Diomedes. Matt gave him a look. "So what'd you show her?"

Matheson shrugged. "Oh, the usual. The rest of the bridge, rec area, dining hall, some of the more public bits of weapons, since she's a designer... then saw her off."

"Ah-hah." He couldn't help smirking. "Didn't make it to your quarters, then?"

"Captain," Matheson said, aggrieved.

Matt just waited. After half a minute, Matheson caved and admitted, "She did invite me over to the Diomedes for coffee. Strictly professional."

"Professional like 'mile-long strap-on with mounting points and a clitoral stimulator'?" He snorted. "On second thought, I don't think you should be seeing this girl. She thinks my ship is a giant dick."

Matheson coughed. "A giant plastic dick."

"Whatever." Matt looked back to the viewscreen, out to where Orestes was drifting over the upper atmosphere. "Ask the Orestes to dock again. I think Ms. Jones has collected plenty of data."

* * *

Morden waited for Lieutenant Matheson and the chirpy weapons designer to leave before he picked up the crystal she'd dropped, unobtrusively, next to the extant pile. After a moment's hesitation, he ejected the volume of poetry he'd been working on and slid the message in. It seated with a faint click, and he brought the contents up on screen. 

'I'd like to discuss a few things with you,' it read in unembellished white-on-blue. 'And as you might guess, it's not the sort of thing I want Captain Gideon to overhear. Drop by when it's next convenient. -- Ivanova.'

It was unexpected, to say the least.

There was a taste in his mouth like blood. He was startled to find he was gnawing on the inside of his lip. He didn't feel...

Well.

Even Max hadn't been so eager to talk to him since he got back. Not that Max wasn't trying to be friendly. But he was trying to pretend that nothing had happened, and kept giving him that confused look when Morden pointed out that things _had_. So they had... collaborated. Joked like they had, years ago. But not _talked_.

He didn't trust this, that was the matter.

But why should he worry? She couldn't do anything to hurt him.

He pulled the crystal and shoved it in his pocket. In any case, it wasn't convenient, not right now. The Excalibur and the Diomedes were on synchronized day-night cycles, and it was midafternoon, so Ivanova would be busy for hours.

He read through Max's notes on the translations, brief though they were, and went back to reading the poetry. When he looked up again, it was ten o'clock. He still hadn't found any words for the poems, or decided what to do about Ivanova's message.

He gathered up the crystals, methodically stacking them in the case he'd earlier dumped them out of. As he walked back to the quarters he'd been assigned, he reached out and very gently tickled the internal sensors of the Diomedes.

_-?-_

_-!-_

Ivanova was still on the bridge.

He reached his room, put down the case of crystals and his pad. He absently scanned for monitoring equipment and shorted out Galen's bugs.

It wasn't that it was hard to teleport any more. He had been terrified, before delivering Talia's message, that he'd wind up in an out of control spin into the Diomedes' fusion drive, or something equally drastic. But it had been remarkably simple, once he put his mind to it. He'd even practiced, during the last few incredibly boring days, jumping down to the planet, over to the Diomedes' more quiet sectors, even once into Galen's ship, where he'd left the case Lorien had given him. It was a matter of finding the other place, knowing how far away it was, and... letting go.

What the hell did she want from him? He was getting sick of defending himself, of fending off glances.

He checked the Diomedes. The bridge crew was trading off, and even Ivanova was taking her cue to leave, heading back to her quarters.

Well, time to decide. This was certainly the most convenient things were going to get.

Captain's quarters on the Diomedes weren't all that much larger than the crew cabin he'd been given on the Excalibur, he was surprised to find. More lavishly appointed, with a small zero-g-safe kitchenette and an incredibly comfortable sofa set, but still small. And there was a curious lack of ornamentation to the place. He recognized it after a moment. Lack of nesting instinct. The furniture came with the apartment. So did the pictures on the walls, for that matter.

She could have just moved in. The Diomedes was a prototype, after all, and this was a shakedown cruise. He sat down on the sofa and absently checked the computer's flight log, then winced. Ivanova had been in command of the Diomedes for six months, and living in these quarters for almost as long. She was almost as bad as he was about decorating.

The door hissed open. Captain Ivanova walked in, briskly unfastening the collar of her jacket and tugging down the zipper. She saw him when she was a few steps in and froze, as the door slid closed behind her.

"If this isn't convenient, I can go," he said.

She stared at him, her right hand unconsciously pressing her jacket closed on her chest. Half-in, half-out of her armor, she was vulnerable, wary.

"No, it's fine," she finally said, and with visible mental effort finished removing her jacket and tossed it on a chair. "Do you want some coffee? Freeze-dried, but it's real."

"Please."

She crossed to the cabinet and started pulling down supplies and assembling apparatus, all carefully stowed in case of zero-g maneuvering. He remembered the procedures. The ritual seemed to focus her movements, and when she handed him a cup of warm coffee, her mask was mostly back in place.

He took a sip, and burned his tongue, and fixed it without thinking. It was getting to be a habit. He briefly wished he had sugar, or milk, but he put that thought aside. He wasn't actually here for coffee.

She sat in the chair she'd thrown her jacket over, to his left, holding her coffee between her hands. She avoided looking at him as she drank, occasionally closing her eyes for a few seconds or shooting glances at the top cabinet, where he assumed she was keeping a private stash of something alcoholic. He waited.

"I'm sorry," she said finally, staring into her cup. "For... grilling you. I mean," she looked up, met his eyes, "I mean, your past is your business, and it was... belligerent of me to demand an explanation of you, especially when it was so personal..." she looked away again. "I'm sorry."

He was staring at his hands, now. The scratching in his throat that he thought he'd banished after that inquisition was back. He closed his eyes and willed it away, but it didn't listen.

"Well," he said after a couple tries. It almost sounded normal. He tried again, aiming for lightness. "I think I know enough personal history about you from working for the Shadows... I guess we can call it even."

Strangely enough it helped. She half-laughed, relaxed a bit.

"Still," she said, sounding much stronger, "It wasn't fair of me. I'm sorry."

"Forgiven. And who ever said life was going to be fair?"

She chuckled. That was reassuring.

"So, was that it?" He found himself reluctant to leave things there. "You just wanted to apologize?"

"Well.." she shrugged. "I wanted to ask you a couple questions. You left a lot out of that interview."

He grimaced. "Some things were better left alone for a while. And I'm not sure Max even knew what questions he wanted to ask."

She nodded, slowly, then said, "What are you really trying to accomplish here?"

That took him aback. He tried to find words. "Well... I wanted to find that database. I wanted to give it to the right people."

"Mmmm, that's not really an answer."

He shrugged. "I wanted to help people."

"But why? Are you trying to make up for what the Shadows did?"

"Or what I did?" he asked bitterly.

She nodded. He sighed. "Not... I mean, not really. I don't think I _can_."

"So why did you come back?"

"Because," he said, the bitterness welling up in his throat, "Because the Vorlons and the Shadows and the rest of the First Ones are just _sitting_ out there, pretending nothing is wrong, when they know damn well something is. And they've had us fighting their battles and dancing to their tune for the last few million years, and now they're just going to ignore us. Someone had to do something. Break the silence. Tell the truth. And they wouldn't let anyone else go."

She opened her mouth to ask something, and he cut her off. "No, I don't know why me. I don't know why not Winters, why not anyone else."

Silence. "Actually," she said wryly, "I just wanted to know what was wrong."

"Ah. That." He shrugged. "It's... It's not going to make any difference for about a million years. But... the First Ones were around for billions of years before we came around. We're supposed to have that sort of time. The fact that we may not is... galling."

"And we may not?"

He shrugged, tried to smile. "Well, not unless we do something about it."

She was staring at him, hands clenched, her cup forgotten on the table in front of her. Tension, suddenly, and that taste in his mouth like blood.

Softly, she said, "Has it ever gotten easier to live with?"

He closed his eyes, felt the ache grow, burn. "I... Day by day, I think I can live with it. But it never feels easier."

"I can't think what I would have done," she whispered.

"I should have refused anyway." Stabbing pain, like ice. "I should have made the deal, watched them stick by it, and then refused. But I had nothing left. Just my word."

"I just..." she said, and suddenly she was talking to him, instead of to herself. "I've been thinking, sometimes, that it might be the same for you, as it is for me..."

He had to try and find words, something, but they wouldn't come. He was a translator, it was his job to find words, and none would come. The world was still, and they weren't talking past each other any more, and she was staring, and he was silent.

"And sometimes," she said, "I can't stand... not knowing..."

And then he was reaching out and she was there and she was here in his arms and her lips on his were so warm, so soft...

* * *

Waking made the whole thing feel like a dream. 

The clock said 0230. It was dark. Aaron's breathing was a steady rhythm beside her, deep in sleep.

Susan rolled over to regard him. Sleeping, he looked innocent. Troubled; his eyes fluttered in a dream. A nightmare?

She reached out and stroked the side of his face. He didn't react. She ran her fingers through his hair. It was irritatingly perfect; it wouldn't stay tousled for more than a few seconds. After a few minutes she gave up in frustration and dropped her hand to the pillow between them.

It was like being curled up next to a predator. She didn't know if she could trust him. She didn't even know if he knew. She just knew that he understood, enough...

Her hand twitched, involuntarily, and she yanked it back against her chest, suddenly terrified. Ice-cold knots in her stomach. 'No... I couldn't.'

She had never, _never_ used her telepathy like that. Never... she wasn't strong enough to scan anyone. She'd never had any training. She probably wasn't even a P-1.

That's what she'd told John. God, that had been so long ago. And now...

Now she wasn't sure if it was true.

Not even a P-1... until she'd entered the Great Machine, and the universe had dropped out from underneath her. Not even a P-1... until she reached out across the vastness and felt the warmth of countless other minds. Not even a P-1... until she'd stepped out of the Machine and felt that something must have changed.

Her blocks since then had been perfect. Blocks were something she was good at. She hadn't noticed any changes in background noise... not really. It hadn't gotten any louder. Just sharper, in the moments just before she fell asleep and slipped headlong into dreams, or when she woke, fuzzy and uncomprehending.

Still. Even if she _could_ scan him, she wouldn't.

She wasn't going to.

No.

She didn't need to scan him, anyway. At least, she didn't need to look into his past for anything. She didn't need to intrude. All she needed was to know if the Shadows were still controlling him, or if he really had been set free. And considering how the Shadows and their influence affected telepaths, well, that shouldn't be hard to determine, should it?

The fate of the human race was resting on trusting this man. She had to try something, or she'd never forgive herself.

Gently, she reached out her hand, and _reached_...

**Pain!**

Explosive, driving her to her knees, acrid taste in her mouth, dust everywhere, ringing in her ears--

'It's not you, it's not yours, it's an echo. Just an echo--'

Her vision cleared. It was a hallway, dirty, somewhere, stone, ringing in her ears turning to a voice--

"This is what they did to Refa, you know."

Londo? What was Londo...

She stood, shakily, pulling herself _apart_ as Aaron answered, "I know."

"And fitting, is it not? He burned towns, sent many of their people to death camps, destroyed countless lives... but it was not why I asked G'Kar to have him killed."

More pain, a vicious punch to the stomach and _Don't argue with him, he's a figment of your imagination and it doesn't do any good._

"No, that was your fault, Mr. Morden." Crunching of boots on gravel, and a sudden kick to the kidneys that had him sprawled on the floor, facedown on the rock. "You know what Adira meant to me."

"Of course," he mumbled into the floor.

"You knew! And you told your associates to have her killed anyway!"

And then pain, pain, and she collapsed and screamed and he looked up and saw her, and suddenly he was holding her, breaking free, and he was asking "What are you--" and she pulled away, fast--

"Wait," he said, grabbing her wrist. She pulled away, shrank to the other side of the bed. "Wait..." _Wait..._

She shivered, terrified, watching him, watching the confused expression on his face, staring at the hand he was holding out tentatively.

_What were you doing?_ he asked.

"I..." Realization hit her. _Oh, God. You're..._

He grimaced and pulled back. "Sorry. I didn't realize. I really didn't. What happened?"

The ice in her stomach was back. "Oh, God. I'm so sorry. I..."

"You were scanning me?" He frowned, shifted back slightly. "Why?"

She couldn't even move, she was so terrified. When he realized it, when she saw him realize that she didn't trust him, she felt sick. She knew what that felt like. God, she knew so much of what he felt like.

Long moments passed. Then he reached out and took her hand, gently pulling her forward.

_I didn't know you were a telepath._

She swallowed. _I'm not much of one._

_Neither am I. I mean, I wasn't at all, before... well. I guess I am now. Or can be. Something._ He frowned in thought, then shrugged. _Though I could have told you to stay out of my dreams._ A wry, sad smile._ They've been pretty nasty for a few years._

_I'm sorry..._

_It's all right._ Reluctantly, she let him draw her close. He held her, breathed forgiveness into her ear. _I understand._

_I just... I don't even know if you can trust yourself. I just don't know._

He reached up and brushed hair out of her eyes, caught her gaze, carefully neutral. _Do you want to see?_

_I..._

_It's all right._ He closed his eyes for a second, then looked up, nervous, hiding it. _It's all right..._

It was like sinking into mercury, soft, warm, quicksilver. She could feel, she could _taste_ how terrified he was, how terrified she was, and how knowing that, they could relax, laugh briefly, hold each other, all right, all right...

And oh, God, she knew, and he knew they knew they shared and he said _Do you know how long_ and she answered _yes,_ and _please,_ and his lips were gentle on her lips jaw throat breasts nerves like fire suddenly and she could see yearning feel and--

Flashback to warm nights on the beach with her and it was perfect and--

Flashback to her brother quizzically staring at her, holding her earring, and--

Flashback to the funeral, not even the decency to rain, Max had been trying to say something for the last ten minutes--

Flashback to her father, saying goodbye in the only way he knew how--

Flashback to Anna Sheridan, trying desperately to save him--

Flashback to Talia, _not_ Talia--

Flashback--

His hands were tangled in her hair, and there were tears on her face, and she was kissing him and trying to breathe and not stop and she had never felt like this with anyone and she wondered briefly if it might have been like this if Talia hadn't left and she cried and he understood and didn't hate her for thinking of that at a time like this and when it was over she was so exhausted she could only breathe, together, if ever together meant anything.

She still had more questions than answers, even with the taste of him in her mouth, in her mind. But they were new questions, better ones, because all of the most frightening ones had been answered.

He was playing with her hair, combing through it with his fingers. He looked up when she caught him and smiled. "Hey."

"Hey." She reached out and tangled her fingers in his hair again, attempted to muss it up some. Failure. "Why does your hair do that, anyway?"

"Hm?" He looked up as though he could see it. "I'm not sure. Something to do with self-identity, I think. I like my hair to stay neat."

"So whatever the Shadows did to you, it lets you keep your hair neat?"

"That and all sorts of other things... like fixing a broken arm."

"When you teleported."

"Yeah." He stroked her hair. "You should sleep."

"Were you really in love with Anna Sheridan?"

His hand stilled, and his face went blank. "I don't know," he whispered after a moment. "I don't... I don't know. I think so. Yes. Maybe." He shook his head, then said, "Were you really in love with Marcus Cole?"

Oh, God. That still hurt.

"I..." Honestly? Honestly, Susan Ivanova? "I don't think I was. He was just so in love with me that... maybe I just don't remember."

"I understand."

Something occurred to her. "What did you mean, you weren't a telepath, but now you 'can be'?"

He made a soft hissing sound, nervous. "It was something Ironheart said. I met him for... what, ten minutes? And he said, I'm not a telepath, but I could be. I think... I think I get to decide."

"You get to decide." She chuckled, but her heart wasn't in it. "You get to turn your own telepath gene on and off?"

He nodded.

"Wow." The implications... "Can you do it for other people?"

He looked startled. "I don't know." He thought about it for a second. "I really don't know."

"Mmm. Well, see if you can figure it out without panicking anyone." She smiled, then surprised herself with a yawn. "Is it really oh-three-hundred? Hell. I should sleep."

He smiled down at her, touched her forehead lightly. "Yes, yes you should. Sweet dreams."

Like sinking into mercury, warm and dark.

* * *

Matt counted off the days on his calendar with gigantic red Xs. There were always things to do on the ship, piles of paperwork to avoid, inspections to oversee, lists of summaries that Matheson capably recited, and every day he ended the day thanking God that there was one less day left until that damn database was fair game. Everyone on the ship was getting wound up thinking about it. He heard whispers in the halls that were stilled as soon as the crew saw him. And of course, Eilerson was insufferable. 

The only person, strangely enough, who was taking the delay with equanimity was Morden, who happily applied himself to his retranslation project. He didn't even flinch when, at three days to go, Matt told him that he wanted Eilerson and Galen to do the preliminary translation without him.

"That's stupid," Eilerson said when he broke the news. "Aaron's the only living expert on the Shadows' language. Wouldn't it be nice to _have_ a preliminary translation as soon as possible?"

"I still don't fully trust your friend," Matt stated baldly. "And I want you and Galen to get a basic translation down before he helps with the details."

Two days. It was like chewing on tinfoil.

Eilerson griped. Endlessly. The dining hall was becoming an irritating place to try and relax, but it was still the best place to work on the ship, so Matt endured Eilerson's pointed comments.

"I mean it's just ridiculous," Eilerson said to Morden, who was poring over the stack of crystals and not looking very interested in complaining.

"I'm sure you'll come up with something," Morden said offhandedly.

"Well, yes, but we're looking for medical data. Something where a mistranslation could wind us in deep trouble."

"We'll burn that bridge when we cross it."

Eilerson made a disparaging noise in his throat, which died as Dureena stalked across the hall towards them. Conversations grew quiet, then started up again. Matt pretended to be absorbed in his coffee.

She sat down across from Morden, next to Eilerson, and watched as the former Shadowminion only barely recognized her presence. Finally she asked, "Do you really think there's a cure in there?"

He looked up. "I think so."

She nodded, apparently satisfied. Eilerson whistled softly.

"Max," Morden said suddenly, "Do you have the slightest idea what an allegory is?"

"Of course I know what an allegory is."

"Do you know what a good allegory is? As opposed to a bad one?"

Eilerson sighed impatiently. "If you wanted a poet, you should have hired a poet."

"You don't need to be a poet to understand exergasia."

"Now who's showing off their Greek?"

"What are you translating?" Dureena asked.

Morden looked up briefly. "Dr. Chambers gave me some crystals she got from a scholar of a race you encountered...?" he said, tipping her to fill in the details.

She nodded. "The Marati."

"Right. Poetry." He looked innocent. "Max's translations were perfectly serviceable. Kind of like the original Loeb translations of Catullus."

"That's just low."

"So you're, what?" She looked from one of them to the other, smirking. "Bringing it up to its proper literary standards?"

"Well, sort of. Most of it's just bad, after all."

She laughed, surprised.

"No, really. You have the entire poetic output of a planet here. Most of it's bound to be drivel, just statistically. It's the best ten percent that's really worth reading. And of course, it's all written from an alien perspective, so some of it just doesn't come across particularly well. And none of it has footnotes."

"Lovely."

He nodded, then frowned, slightly, in thought. He pulled the crystal from his pad, looked for another on the table, and plugged it in.

Dureena watched, eyebrows furrowed, as he tapped a series of commands on the pad, then started scribbling with the entry pen. He worked for a few minutes, occasionally pausing in thought, mostly writing or angrily signaling the backspace command, an input that Matt was able to identify backwards from across the room, thanks to long familiarity.

Finally, Morden looked up, turned the pad around and handed it to Dureena, expressionless. She stared at him, then took the pad and read it.

Her expression didn't change, and then she dropped the pad.

She concealed it, as well as she could, but she couldn't conceal that her hands were shaking and--her hands were shaking!--and she pushed it back to him with a jerky motion and said "I didn't know you were actually _on_ Zander Prime. When did you learn my language?"

"I'm not sure," Morden said. He sounded distracted, confused.

Worried?

Matt wasn't sure he liked where this was going.

Two more days.

* * *

"Hey, Captain?" 

Susan looked up from her paperwork to Elle, who was standing in the door of her office/retreat/sanctuary. "Yes?"

Elle looked around nonchalantly. "Some of the guys and I have been wondering when you decided to trust this guy."

That was precisely not what Susan had wanted to hear. "Sorry?" she replied, hoping that she was overreacting.

"You know the one. The guy we had that briefing about. Dangerous. Worked for the Shadows when that meant something. Can teleport." Elle gave her a long look. "The one you had me take that secret message to. The one you're now getting it on with, unless all my instincts on the matter have been switched off in the past week."

Captains couldn't shoot themselves in the head. It just wasn't done. Susan closed her eyes, sighed to herself, and said "Step inside and close that door. Who have you been talking with?"

"Ah, if it's official then we have to make it official," Elle said, closing the door. "I'm a civilian. This can be as unofficial as you like. Your crew trust you, boss, but they don't know if they can trust this guy. Especially because you told them you didn't."

"Shit," Susan said.

"Well?" Elle gesticulated grandly. "Why are you trusting him? He didn't put the voodoo on you or anything, right? And you're not the type to trust someone just because you want to screw them."

Susan perched her chin on her hand and thought, quickly. Elle would probably be satisfied with the answer of 'personal reasons.' For Elle, personal reasons were fine. But what about the people who she had, indeed, told about Morden, that he wasn't to be trusted, that they might be in danger just staying here?

Personal reasons wasn't going to go over so well, there. Nor was her conclusion that if he really meant them any harm, they wouldn't be able to do anything about it, anyway. She could just see Trevor's reaction to _that_.

"I asked you to take a message to him," she said, "Because I wanted to ask him some questions, and find out if some of the things I know, independently of Captain Gideon, matched up with the rest of his story. And they did."

Elle relaxed. "So his story does check out, then."

Susan nodded. "I trust it a lot more than I did last week. And you can quote me on that. For one thing, I believe he did meet and get his pass from Lorien. And that's a good reason to believe he's not here to cause trouble."

"You knew this Lorien guy pretty well, then?"

"As well as anyone can know any of the First Ones, I guess. He helped us a lot during the last bit of the Shadow War. A whole lot." She hesitated. "He brought Sheridan back to life, on Z'Ha'dum."

Elle's eyes went wide. "Woah. So the rumor is true? He did die, and all that?"

"Yeah." She suddenly felt a headache coming on. "And speaking of Sheridan, I'm going to have to give him a good explanation, so I might as well give the crew a formal update on the situation. And the guys on the Excalibur open the database in two days."

"Yeah, but John says they're not using that Morden guy for preliminary translations."

Susan had to do a few mental backflips before she remembered the name. "And how is Lieutenant Matheson?"

"Oh, he's good. Better now that I've taught him to use his fingers in conjunction with his tongue. You'd think a telepath would pick that up faster."

Oh, God. "Too much information, Jones."

"Sorry, was I talking about sex again?"

"You're always talking about sex."

"I think it's because I don't get enough." She suddenly grinned. "Do you think Mr. Morden's up to taxiing people back and forth?"

Susan groaned. Then another thought struck her. "You're not discussing my personal life with the crew of the Excalibur, are you?"

Elle blinked at her. "Uh, no, _I'm_ not."

"Or any particular crewmember?"

"Honestly, Captain. I haven't told John anything about you." She paused, frowned in thought. "Maybe something about that one time you picked up that girl at that one place, and there was a bar fight with those two bruisers who thought they could take you. But just because their expressions were priceless."

Susan winced. "I guess I can live with that."

"But it's going to get out sometime, Captain."

"I know." She smiled wearily. "Hopefully not before I can come up with a really good excuse for 'fraternizing with the enemy.' Thanks for coming to me with this."

As soon as the door closed behind Elle, Susan groaned and buried her head in her hands.

"My ears were burning," Aaron said from behind her. "Are you all right?"

She half-turned and glared. "Are you bugging my office?"

He shook his head. "No." At her continued disbelief, he sighed. "It's more complicated than that. I can stop if you want."

"No, it's just--don't they miss you over there?"

"Galen might. He's supposed to keep track of me. He gets peeved because I keep turning off his monitors."

Despite herself she was struck by an image of the serene, mysterious techno-mage pouting over a tiny camera which had inexplicably stopped working, and she snickered. He smiled, maneuvered around her chair to perch on her desk. "See? It can't be that bad. What's wrong?"

She winced. "Elle and some of my senior staff have figured us out."

"Ah." He made a face, annoyed, but not surprised. "I wondered how long it would take."

"It's going to get back to the Excalibur eventually. If only because Lieutenant Matheson has been spending more time in Elle's quarters than his own, and that means Excalibur shuttle crews are over here on a regular basis." She sighed. "Which means, apart from any of this, that my judgment is compromised, meaning my voice in this whole situation is gone."

"Don't worry." He took her hand, and he was smiling softly when she looked up at him. "They're opening the database in two days. That'll give them something else to think about."

"What's in there, anyway?"

He shrugged. "Lots of information. Weapons, technology, history..." he trailed off. "The truth about a lot of things. Why the Shadow War happened. What they've been doing to us. Why they did it."

She watched him try to shrug it off, to smile, but whatever information he'd learned was dark behind his eyes. He met her gaze and his smile vanished.

"Why don't you want to talk about it?" she asked.

"I..." He grimaced. "Part of me just hopes it isn't true."

"And?"

"And..." He looked away. "I think there's more in there than I initially thought. Notes on us. And... I think I've been accessing it without realizing."

There was a ringing in her ears as she very carefully asked, "Oh? What do you mean?"

He shrugged, but she could tell that he could tell she was worried, and--"This morning, I learned Dureena's language in, what, five minutes? That's beyond even my considerable skill at languages." He grinned, lamely. "And when I--even talking about this is hard, all right? We don't have words for these concepts. When I looked at the information and tried to figure out where it came from, it was more... formal, than if I'd actually sat down and learned the language myself. When you learn another language you cross-reference. You find analogues in your own language for concepts and ideas that don't quite come across. This was different."

"You don't think it's... programming you?"

He shrugged again. Resigned. "If they'd wanted to do that, they could have programmed me during those two weeks they had me unconscious back past the Rim."

"Unless they just set you up to receive signals."

"And left this to beam messages into my head when I was sleeping?" He shook his head. "It's probably just an unconscious interface... thing I didn't know was there. Probably. I can't trust them, but at some point..." he sighed.

"It isn't paranoia if they are out to get you," she pointed out.

"Ha." He grinned, angrily, slightly manic. Then he stood and pulled her to her feet. "If you could go anywhere, now, where would you go?"

"I..." She looked around, laughed slightly. "What do you mean--"

"Anywhere. Now."

"St. Petersburg," she said reflexively, then suddenly realized what she was possibly agreeing to. "But the plague--"

She was there. They were there. Cobblestones under her feet. He was standing behind her and his arms were around her and he was whispering, as she stared up at the sky and around at the people, "It's all right. Trust me. I won't let you get infected. We won't pick it up."

It was evening, the stars overhead were twinkling, the lights all around, the people, the snow--"But..."

"You don't believe me? Here." And they were on the Moon.

Outside the domes. Grey dust underfoot. She gasped, instinct saying she was choking, but she could breathe, wasn't cold, and he laughed and pulled her close and they were _floating_, blackness everywhere, stars as far as she could see--

And then back, in her office, and he was laughing, and just a little hysterical, holding her as though he were drowning.

After a few deep breaths, she said, "Are you absolutely sure that we didn't pick up the plague in those few seconds?"

He was shaking. _She_ was shaking. He stopped laughing and said, "Absolutely. One hundred percent."

"But how can you know for sure?"

"There are things I know for sure." His breath was warm on the back of her neck, his arms tight around her ribs. She grabbed his hands. They were cold. Her hands were cold. They had been floating in vacuum. There was moondust on her shoes, on the cuffs of her pants.

He held her, or held onto her, until the shivers went away, until she was sure she was really here, on her ship, and breathing, and he was sure... of whatever he hadn't been fully sure of, when he knew at least that they weren't killing the rest of her crew just by being here, from Earth.

"I can't just _not_ do these things," he finally said, softly. "They wired me up, they put a set of instructions in my brain, and... a lot of it's instinct. If someone came at you with a gun, you'd know how to defend yourself. The universe comes at me with problems, and... I have to try and find answers."

"But what if someone gets hurt?" she whispered.

She could hear him--feel him--close his eyes, and sigh. "I just have to believe at some point, humanity means more than the Vorlons and Shadows put together," he said.

And that left her cold, when he pulled away, and there was only empty space and herself in her small office, and her concerns about who was keeping tabs on her personal life were suddenly completely insignificant.

And she wondered, as she sat down and tried to wipe the moondust from her shoes, if opening the database wasn't just another beginning, after all, and no closure in sight.

* * *

"Can he be in the same _room_ as us?" 

Matt deliberated the wisdom of attempting to beat his brains out against the wall. On one hand, he wouldn't have to listen to Eilerson any more. On the other hand, he wouldn't learn what was in the damn black box that he'd spent two weeks staring at.

"No, Max," he said wearily. "Mr. Morden is not allowed in the room while you're doing the translation."

"Captain, you are crippling me in the course of a scientific investigation which has the potential to not only save billions of lives, but make all of us indescribably rich."

"Max..."

"Medical data, Captain. I'm not a doctor and neither is Galen."

"Neither is Morden."

"But he's demonstrated that he's fluent."

Matt pinched the bridge of his nose and willed Eilerson to vanish in a puff of smoke. It didn't work. "Fine. But only have him there to consult on the details."

"Of course." Eilerson smirked in victory. "I have to prove to him that my lovely assistant the computer is more talented than he is."

Matt stayed down in the isolab long enough to watch Dr. Chambers run the final tests on the box, then crack the seals to let Eilerson pull it out and start attaching monitoring equipment to it. Then he went back to the bridge.

After twenty minutes, Matheson cleared his throat at his elbow. "Sir?"

"Yes, Lieutenant?"

Very quietly, Matheson said, "If it's driving you crazy, you should probably just go down there and watch them work for a while. I don't think we'll be facing a crisis up here."

He stared at his XO's concerned expression for a few seconds before admitting, "It's that obvious?"

"Yes, sir."

"I won't get any more information down there than I will up here."

"No sir, but you will have Eilerson around to take your frustrations out on."

He thought about that for a moment. "All right. I'll take any damage to the walls out of our operating budget."

Matheson _still_ looked better in his chair than he did. Dammit.

Eilerson or some of the techs had dragged the database to the center of the room and hooked a bunch of equipment to it. A page of text was hovering over it, and a camera had been rigged to echo the view to a monitor on the wall. Eilerson was tapping away on his keyboard, and Galen was leaning against the wall studying the screen. Morden was back in the corner at a desk, flipping through his pile of Marati crystals. He looked up as Matt entered, smiled wryly. "Hello, captain."

Matt looked around. "Any progress yet?"

Eilerson made a growling sound. "I've finally managed to trace-scan the last of the characters into my computer, but the line structure is giving the parser a few hiccoughs... still, with Galen's able assistance I've hardcoded enough sentences and scanned in enough text to give us a basic working syntax and vocabulary. In a few more minutes I should have adjusted the parameters enough to try for a first pass translation."

"And you'll get gibberish," Morden said.

"Of _course_ I'll get gibberish," Eilerson said, twisting halfway around in his seat. "That's what recursive translation programming techniques do."

"Well," Matt said. "Don't let me stop you."

"Believe me, captain," Eilerson said, already back to his keyboard. "It would take more than a few idle questions to upset the well-machined workings of my brain."

"No," Morden said. "Just the suggestion that Alais at Dawn is a piece of garbage."

"Is _not_," Eilerson shot back huffily.

"Sure it is."

"It's the most brilliant piece of cinema of our generation. It's both a visual and conceptual masterpiece."

Morden smirked and turned in Matt's direction. "He just likes it because it brought back Argentine tango and he could finally pick up women."

"And you hate it because you can't dance."

"Sure I can."

"No you can't. Do you know how I met Cynthia?" Eilerson gestured expansively. "We were in a bar in Boston, and she walks over and asks him to dance. And he, being the stupidest person in the bar, says he can't dance but I can."

"I said I'm not a dancer but you think you're the reincarnation of Mikhail Serkis."

"Whatever. I then proceed to prove to her that I am, in fact, the reincarnation of Mikhail Serkis and wind up taking her home."

"And eventually married her." Morden shook his head. "Where is she, anyway?"

Eilerson blinked, looked at his feet briefly before turning back to his computer. "She left me about five years ago."

There was an uncomfortable pause. "I'm sorry," Morden said.

"It's all right. We still keep in touch."

"Was she on Earth when..."

"No, she moved to Proxima when we split up." Eilerson shrugged, then went back to typing, slowly at first, then faster.

Matt traded a glance with Galen, who didn't look too surprised. Then again, Galen very rarely looked surprised. Especially when he was.

"Max," Morden said after a pause, "You don't use the word 'raptor' in a love poem."

"What the hell do you know about love poetry?"

"That it often gets mistranslated."

"Go and fix it, then. Why'd I even bother getting the PhD from Princeton in the first place?"

"I don't know. Should have taken a few more English classes."

"I was busy."

"You weren't busy reading Gallinger, that's for sure."

"Excuse me for wanting to train to do field work." Eilerson hit a few keys, then reached to a separate dial and fiddled. Text jumped over the database, on the wall. Galen looked up and peered at the hovering words.

"All right," Eilerson said. "Here's run one." He hit three keys with a triumphant flourish.

The wall displayed an overlay of English text in bright yellow. Galen frowned at it while Eilerson considered his laptop.

"Well," Galen finally said. "Some of the words have the correct roots."

"Right." Eilerson cracked his knuckles. "Give me some information."

Galen started translating, haltingly. "In the world of light we created art for the universe, and kept the city as a home for peace and life. Our finest arts and magics were turned to the task of building the vehicles we... became?"

"Close enough," Morden said from across the room.

Galen cleared his throat and continued. "We have been named by the stars, for we come to the stars for guidance. We have been chosen by the stars, for we come to the stars for wisdom. We have been chosen by destiny, for destiny is a name for all forces acting in concert. We are the ones who have created and become our creations, the synthesis that reaches the stars and our innermost souls. We are the ones who will teach and be taught, form ourselves and be formed by others. We are that which we create, and our work is blessed because it is in us. We have given ourselves to others so we may perfect ourselves and our creations."

"The word isn't creations," Morden said. "It's starships."

Galen shot him a look. "It doesn't say starships."

"It does."

"Let's try this again," Eilerson interrupted them. He entered a few keystrokes and the English text disappeared, then redrew.

Galen peered at it. "Not yet."

"You don't expect success on the first few tries." More keystrokes.

"So," Galen said casually. "How have the rest of you been spending your time waiting for this magic series of moments?"

"Trying to keep Max from drooling on the window," Matt said. "Why, how have you been spending your time?"

"Well, it's very strange. Some time ago I found that someone had left a gift for me. Inside my ship."

He glared at Morden, who smirked without looking up. "Happy Hanukkah."

"Yes, well, it got me thinking about what else Mr. Morden has been up to on his spare time?"

"What," Morden said, "Besides putting the iambic pentameter back in Max's sonnets?"

"I preserved the meter from the original," Eilerson griped.

"Sometimes to preserve accuracy you have to sacrifice precision."

"It's just that according to the rumors I've heard from over on the Diomedes you and Captain Ivanova have become rather fast friends over the last couple of weeks," Galen said.

Morden didn't answer. Matt stared. "Fast friends?" he said. "You've been over there entertaining Ivanova whenever you have a chance?"

"We've had a few discussions," Morden said.

"More than _that_, from what I hear."

Morden shrugged slightly. "Junior technicians have dirty minds. And I know for certain you haven't managed to plant one of your little cameras in Ivanova's quarters. Or her office. Or most anywhere on her ship, actually."

Galen frowned. Morden looked up and raised his eyebrows. "Moralizing disapproval from you, Galen?"

"What, is it true?" Matt asked, incredulous.

Morden frowned into space for a moment, then shrugged. "We have a lot in common."

Eilerson shook his head absently. "You and Captain Ivanova." Then he stopped typing and spun around. "Wait. You and Captain Ivanova?"

Morden looked up. "Yes, Max."

Eilerson stared in honest surprise. "She's not going to try and make you keep kosher, is she?"

"She's a _Russian_ Jew. She doesn't keep kosher."

"Right, because I remember that argument. No paschal offering for you."

"I'm so disappointed I could spit."

"Anyway, I thought she hated you."

"Yes, well, every relationship has its hurdles to overcome."

"I guess that love poetry stuff works."

"Wait a minute," Matt said. "You actually got Captain Ivanova to trust you, after all that?"

Morden looked up with a bland expression. "Yes."

"How did you manage that?"

He looked pensive, shrugged. "I told her the truth."

"And the truth will set you free?" Galen asked.

"Here," Eilerson said, tapping another keystroke sequence. He leaned forward eagerly, then swore.

Morden stood, walked over to take a look at the output. "Well," he said. "You've managed to recreate most of Zero Wing."

"Go back to your Neruda," Eilerson grumbled.

Matt took the opportunity to excuse himself and walk back toward the shuttle. Ivanova and Morden. Not something he'd expected to happen. Now he was feeling out-flanked. He should call her up and demand--

Oh, no. That wasn't a conversation he wanted to get into. Not at all. He had a feeling that if he started demanding details of Captain Ivanova's personal life he'd find himself on the receiving end of a beating from his own severed arm.

Fortunately, he had at least one spy in the enemy's camp. When he got back to the bridge, he caught Matheson for a short conference out of hearing.

Matheson didn't want to get involved either.

"Sir?"

"Just have you heard anything. Any rumors..."

"About Captain Ivanova's personal life?" He looked skeptical. "Sir, they're all terrified of her over there. I mean, it's in a very respectful way, of course. But she's a legend."

"I know, I know. But... well, that weapons developer doesn't seem all that terrified of legends."

"Elle?" Matheson shrugged. "Well, she told me one story. But it's months old. Involved a bar fight on Beta Durani."

"Mmm, no, I was looking for something more recent."

"Sir? Is something going on?"

"I just have a few questions, Lieutenant."

He left the bridge. He wanted to do something, dammit. He'd been on edge since they picked up the damn box, and now that they were cracking it he had the distinct feeling that his control over the situation had been brushed aside. He wanted to go back to landing on planets and dealing with people shooting at him. That, at least, was straightforward.

Actually, not getting shot at was nice. Waiting for knives in the dark wasn't.

He went to the gym for a few hours. When he was done working off his irritation and cleaning up, he headed back to the translation team. Even before he got inside, he could hear Eilerson and Galen arguing.

"It _is_ starships!"

"Maximilian, as much as I admire your linguistic talents--"

"You just don't want to admit that Aaron is right."

"Do you realize what the implications of your assertion are?"

Matt stepped around the corner in time to see Galen jabbing his finger at the screen. "There," the techno-mage snapped. "Read that from your precious translation."

Eilerson sighed and bent over the text. "'We agreed to continue in our capacity as the _starships_,'" he read, leaning on the word, "'for the other races while building our facade and reimagining our planet.' What's wrong with that?"

Galen stared at him. "The other races," he said. "The Vorlons."

Eilerson frowned, looked back at his translation. "Wait, what?"

"The Vorlon ships," Galen said. "That means that the Shadows... _were_ the Vorlon ships."

Matt felt his mouth go dry. "Wait a minute," he said. They looked up, startled. "We've got a Vorlon ship _in our docking bay_."

They stared at each other for a moment. Matt closed his eyes, then looked to his right to glare at Mr. Morden.

Morden was leaning against the desk with his arms crossed, looking nothing so much as resigned. "I told you you wouldn't believe me," he said.

"That's impossible," Galen said, starting forward. "We would have known."

"What, the techno-mages?" Morden smiled, nastily. "You would have _known?"_

"_Yes_," Galen insisted. "The Shadows are instantly recognizable. Their technology--"

"Galen," Morden said, stepping forward. Galen pulled back in surprise. "Don't blink."

Galen stared at Morden for a few seconds, then hissed and shook his head. Morden nodded, slowly.

"The Shadows _and_ the Vorlons have been running rings around us since before we were an ambulatory species," he said as Galen walked away to stand next to the database. "Did you really think that we could understand what they were up to?"

"Wait a minute, what did you just do to Galen?" Matt asked, angrily.

"Nothing," Morden said blandly. "I just demonstrated that I know more about what the Shadows can and can't do than he does."

"So, wait," Eilerson said, removing his glasses and rubbing at the bridge of his nose. "If the Shadows and the Vorlon fleet were the same... people, does that mean they were shooting at _themselves_ during the war?"

"Yes, Max," Morden said. "That's exactly what it means."

Eilerson looked up, spread his hands and quietly asked, "Why?"

Morden closed his eyes for a moment, as though... nerving himself? "Because they were willing to die for their cause. And their cause needed a war."

"Why?" Eilerson said again.

"Because it turns out the Shadows were right."

He let _that_ implication sink in for a few moments. Matt felt himself growing angrier. "Wait a minute. You come back and bring us this thing just to tell us your old bosses were right?"

"Do you think I'm _happy_ about that?" Morden snapped. "They--I--_billions_ of people are dead, because of that war. Worlds destroyed. I want them to be wrong. I want their philosophy to be dead. I want to paint 'NEVER AGAIN' across the universe in supernovas to burn it into people's..." He gestured weakly, miserably, then pointed at the database. "Go back to the beginning and find out what their point was. Find out why. Find out what they were trying to save us all from."

Eilerson was staring at his friend. It took him a few seconds to turn around and manipulate the controls to bring up earlier text.

Matt cleared his throat as Eilerson typed in the translation command. "What are you translating, anyway?"

"The Shadows' true name," Galen answered quietly. "Their identity."

"What's a photino?" Eilerson asked.

Galen turned, brow wrinkling. "A what?"

"Oh, _I_ understand," Eilerson said, manipulating the screen. Text flowed, and a new translation appeared. "It's all interlinked. See, I can input from the translation program and get a definition."

"Nice job," Morden said. He seemed somewhat calmer. "You've taught it that you speak English."

"A subatomic particle of dark matter," Eilerson said. Then, "What?"

"Never mind." Morden waved it off. "Keep reading. This is important."

Matt eyed him for a moment, then turned back to Eilerson. "Dark matter?"

"Yeah. There's baryonic matter... which is us," Eilerson said. "And then there's... uh, photinic matter, which is them." The text on the screen scrolled back, quickly. "See? The two types don't interact, except for gravity."

"That seems like a pretty big interaction to me," Matt pointed out.

"Not necessarily," Galen said. He was reading, speaking slowly. "It's fairly weak as these things go... not on the order of most matter-matter interactions..." he trailed off.

"They're killing stars," Eilerson said flatly.

Matt stared at him. "What?"

"You're right," Galen said. "That is what it says."

"The photinos," Eilerson said, pointing at the screen. "They're killing stars. Snuffing them out."

"Wait a minute. I don't understand." Matt held up his hands. "Which stars?"

Eilerson stared at him. "All of them."

That wasn't good. "... All? All of the stars in the galaxy?"

Eilerson's stare became slightly... what, pitying? "All the stars in the universe."

"All of them."

"All of them."

Matt looked over at the glowing text. "So how do we stop them?"

Galen answered. "No one knows."

"What, the First Ones didn't have a solution?"

"No," Galen said. He sounded at though someone had just yanked the rug out from under his feet. "No, they didn't."

"Great." He turned back to Eilerson. "How much time do we have?"

"Uh..." Eilerson stared at the screen blankly. "I have to calculate it. It's measured in rotations around the galactic core."

"Five hundred million years," Morden said.

"Oh," Matt said in relief. "That's not so bad."

"Captain," Eilerson snapped, "we're talking about the extinction of the universe. That isn't supposed to happen on these time scales. It's been over ten billion years since the beginning of the universe. Now this is saying we have less than one billion left."

Matt's head was throbbing. He rubbed at his eyes a bit but it didn't go away. "All right. Look. This extinction of the universe is a big problem, but we've got a little time to deal with it. In the meanwhile, we have the extinction of the human race to worry about. So why don't we put the history lesson on hold and go digging for a cure to the plague?"

Eilerson and Galen looked at each other. Then Eilerson shook his head and turned back to his console. "Of course. The plague. Right..."

"Tell Dr. Chambers and myself as soon as you have something you think we can use," he ordered. "We'll take off for Theta 49 as soon as we're ready."

Morden looked up, confused. "What's on Theta 49?"

"Test population."

He left without explaining. He had an urge to be back on the bridge, and bored.

* * *

Susan could have expected the recall order. 

She'd finally sent her detailed report, skirting around her relationship with Morden but indicating that his story had been independently verified by Galen, admitting that she'd gone to Sheridan as an expert on the First Ones... and now she was on her way home, and the Excalibur was soon to be on its way... somewhere.

"Orion system," Morden had told her when she'd asked. "There's some sort of localized infected population there. It's a few days away, and we're leaving as soon as Dr. Chambers thinks she knows what she's doing."

It was a little more than two days to the Solar system. And now she was at Ganymede docks, handing the keys to the Diomedes back to General Spencer, saying goodbye to Elle and watching the rest of her crew get some leave time.

She was standing in front of Spencer's desk, waiting for her next assignment, and wondering if he was going to strip her bars for going over his head to the Alliance or promote her for possibly helping find a cure for the plague or...

"Good work, Captain," he said. "You're to be commended. Now, your next assignment. I need you to leave immediately."

She blinked. "Sir?"

General Spencer was a short man, a keglike frame on stocky legs. He stood and placed his hands on his desk, looking like a grey-haired bulldog with something to worry between his teeth. "We've got a ship for you and your crew. It's running a prototype AI system which has already been programmed, but we need a crew in case something goes wrong."

"And you already have a mission for it?"

"Indeed." He glanced down at his desk and picked up a sheet of paper an a few data crystals, which he handed to her. "Here are your marching orders. Get your crew together and get on it."

"But... shore leave--"

"This takes precedence, Captain. On your way."

She found herself outside the General's office, not entirely sure what had just happened. Shaking her head, she headed to the officer's club to find Trevor.

He was drinking with a gaggle of junior lieutenants--Tracy Neece, Lisa Connery, and Jessica Tanaka. The girls attempted to look sober as she came up, but didn't seem to notice anything was wrong.

Trevor did. "That was fast."

"Yes, it was. We've been ordered to a new command."

He nodded. "When?"

"Now."

The girls were startled. Trevor was appalled. "Captain, that's ludicrous. We've been on tour for months. We're supposed to have time off." He looked down at the glass in his hand. "At least to have a few drinks."

"I know." She thought longingly of the bottle of Medoyeff stashed in her personal effects. "I know. It contradicts all sense. But something's got General Spencer in a hurry, which means we're in a hurry."

"The crew won't like it. Hell, I'll be surprised if we can get underway at all."

She grimaced. "They're good soldiers. We'll make it. Dock 81-B. Round up everyone you can; I'll find our crew."

It took six hours to round up everyone, another two to finish stowing and touring. In the meantime, Susan got a shuttle pilot to give her a short-hop overview of her new ship.

It was black; instead of gunmetal grey like the rest of Earthforce, the cruiser was a flat black that barely reflected the stars. It was made of graceful curves, like a boomerang or a scimitar. Artificial gravity, plenty of space for crew to spread out. At least that would be appreciated.

"It's a beautiful ship," the pilot said. She was a quiet, focused Asian woman who looked half Susan's age. "What's her name?"

"Rhinegold," Susan replied. After a second, she had to chuckle. Eilerson was right. EA command had a lousy track record at naming ships.

"Captain on deck," Trevor announced when she stepped onto the command deck half an hour later.

"As you were," she ordered. She looked around. The bridge reminded her a good deal of the White Star model; consoles organized around a central open area, giving Trevor plenty of room to maneuver and organize. Her chair, on further inspection, had armrests with built-in tactical displays and controls for main screen overlays.

"So," she said after a few moments. "What about this AI?"

"Hello, Captain," came a flat male voice from her right armrest.

That was startling. Most Earthforce user interface systems had a female vocal synthesizer; the only male one she'd met was Sparky, the experimental AI that had briefly been around on Babylon 5. Until Garibaldi had his way with the system. "Uh, hello," she said. She looked at Trevor for assistance and only got a shrug in return. "How shall I address you?"

"I am the ship."

"So... Rhinegold, then."

"All crew have come aboard and we have been given clearance for departure," the ship said.

Trevor was looking decidedly unhappy. Susan knew how he felt. "You've been programmed with our destination," she said, "But it's mysteriously absent from my copy of our orders. Where are we going?"

The Rhinegold was silent for a disturbingly long moment. "Theta Forty-Nine, there to investigate possible instance of rogue colony survival based on rumors reported by scout, five days ago."

"Rogue colony?" Trevor asked.

"Possible contamination by Drakh plague," the ship clarified.

Drakh plague... test population?

She pulled up a map. Sure enough, Theta 49 was a planet in the Orion System.

"All right. Let's go investigate."

The ship pulled away from the dock. Her bridge crew suddenly looked _very_ unhappy. Susan cleared her throat. "Is there any way to put maneuvers under manual control?"

"Manual control is for emergencies only, for backup in case primary control fails," the ship intoned.

Susan caught Trevor's eye and held it for a moment. He nodded, ever-so-slightly. She leaned back in her chair and tried to relax. It was a two-day jump to the Orion system, and she'd had a headache ever since coming on board.

* * *

Matt and the crew of the Excalibur had met Robert Black almost six months ago, tipped off by Earthforce that his small group of colonists may have caught the plague when they left Earth in the chaos of the Drakh attack. Earthforce hadn't mentioned that Black and his people had been victims of Earthforce R&D, bionic soldiers created and then discarded like so many hairless mice. The wise heads in Earthforce Gray had decided that the colony had to be silenced permanently, and deliberately seeded their food with the virus. Determined to not be shipped back to Earth in the care of General Thompson, Black had worked out a deal with Matt, sacrificing his shuttle for the life of the colony. 

And now the entire colony site had been destroyed.

Matt stared at the hollow shell of what had been the main compound. The buildings had been hit from orbit, some time ago, but recently enough that the scars were still fresh. There was no sign of survivors.

"Thompson?" Dr. Chambers asked.

He nodded. "He must have found out somehow."

There was a whirr behind him of a starting engine. He turned in time to see Dureena trying to start one of their short-range flyers. He sprinted back to the cover of the transport, grabbed her arm before she could take off. "Dureena--"

"Let me go!" she snapped as the safeties killed the engine.

The last of her people, a lost colony, were on this planet. If Thompson had scanned the planet from orbit...

He held on as she tried to pull her arm away. "You can't fly this thing," he pointed out. At her glare, he added, "I can. Come on."

He'd never been to the settlement on the cliffs that Dr. Chambers and Dureena had described. As they approached, he hoped that the lack of smoke meant a lack of damage, rather than a lack of habitation. He landed near the edge of the plateau and Dureena was off running before the engine died.

He followed her toward the mountains, into rockier terrain. As he passed a tall outcrop of stone he heard someone sigh and holster a weapon.

He turned, PPG out, to see Robert Black step out from hiding. "Good to see you," Black said, ignoring the weapon.

Matt put the gun away. "And you. What happened?"

Black shook his head. "Someone hit us from orbit. We didn't have any warning. It was a week ago... they didn't show up on our sensors, just came in and wiped out the base. Tim is dead. Half our people are dead. The rest of us headed for the hills, but..." he trailed off, then stared. "You have a cure?"

"Yes," Matt said. "At least we think so. That's why we came here."

"The villagers are dying." Black motioned back toward the cliffs, vaguely. "They've lost six people over the last two weeks."

"Well, they won't lose any more to the plague, not if I have anything to say about it."

His wristcomm chirped. He turned from Black's exhausted expression to answer it. "Gideon."

Matheson. "Captain, where are you?"

"We've found survivors," he said without elaboration. "We're at the cliffs."

"Captain, something's showing up on our sensors. Another ship."

"Identification?"

"We're just getting a silhouette."

He looked up. Black was staring at him. Matt made some very fast decisions. "I'm going back to the shuttle. Tell Galen to get that transmitter set up as fast as he can. If the ship makes any hostile moves, destroy it."

"Yes, sir."

"Transmitter?" Black asked.

"The virus is made from nanotechnology, coded with a control signal," Matt explained. "We hacked the signal and figured out how to turn it off." He turned back to the flyer. Black followed him.

"That ship is probably the same one that destroyed the colony."

"I know. I want to get a good look at it." He activated his comm again. "Dureena?"

A hesitation, then "What?"

"Ship's been sighted, I'm heading back to the shuttle."

"I'm staying here."

"Fine. Galen's getting the transmitter set up." Matt jerked his head at the flyer, a question to Black. He nodded. "Black's coming back with me so Chambers can get a look at him."

"Fine."

He and Black landed at the shuttle a few minutes later. Galen had set up a... contraption that looked like several balanced tripods. It covered half of a table, and Dr. Chambers had put out as much monitoring equipment as she could fit on the rest. As Black went to talk with her, Matt sprinted into the shuttle.

Trace was in the pilot's seat, staring at the monitor. "Captain, take a look at this thing."

Matt maneuvered past him into the copilot's seat. He looked at the monitor and tried to make out the shape of the ship.

The shape against the stars...

Black, spiky, gliding...

(He wasn't breathing any more, he watched the ship move across his monitor--)

_He was drifting and the Cerberus suddenly lit engines, and he called out on his comm but all he could hear was panic, "Jump! Jump!"--the beam lanced out and carved through the superstructure like butter, and all he could do was watch and scream and_

"GALEN!" he bellowed, vaulting down the hatchway.

Galen had his eyes closed, hands on either side of the device. "I'm busy, Matthew," he said with perfect calm.

Black and Dr. Chambers were staring at him. He was fuming, and didn't care. "Galen, your ship's sensors are ten times as good as ours. I want you to take a look at that ship up there."

"Not now, Matthew," Galen said. "We have to save the human race, first."

"That ship destroyed the Cerberus."

"No, the ship that destroyed the Cerberus was destroyed. This is another ship."

"Then it was built by the same people."

"Almost certainly. Now if you'll excuse me--"

"Dammit, Galen!" He was seeing red. "I need to know who's behind this!"

"Captain!" Trace yelled from the shuttle. "They've opened fire on the Excalibur!"

Matt swallowed his rage and ran back inside. He watched on the monitor as the Excalibur's secondary guns strafed the ship. It was outlined in green fire for almost a minute before it exploded.

He slumped into the copilot's chair, fire turning to ice in his veins. 'It was real. It was all real. And now...'

"Well," Trace said. "It's dead now."

Matt thought about that for a minute. Then he called the bridge.

"Excalibur."

"Matheson, get an EVA team to gather any wreckage from that ship. I want a full analysis."

"Yes, sir."

He mulled the situation over in silence. After a few moments, Trace cleared his throat beside him. "A destroyer carries a crew of what, a thousand?"

"One thousand forty crew and support." Reflex.

"Damn," the pilot muttered.

"Trace, you trained to be a priest once," Matt said.

Trace looked up, startled. "Yeah, but..."

"What does the literature say about bad things happening to good people?"

Trace shook his head. "The Foundation says that we can never explain God, or define Him, or understand His motives."

Matt snorted. "Seems like a bit of a cop-out."

"Yeah, that's what I thought."

He patted Trace on the shoulder and stumbled outside to see how saving humanity was going.

Galen was still focused on the machine, but his eyes were open and he was toying with screws and fiddly bits. Sarah was grinning as she read data off one of her monitors, and Black looked like he'd been pollaxed.

"We blew it up," he announced. "Good news here?"

Sarah nodded. "It's gone. There's no trace of infection."

"Wonderful." He still felt dizzy from watching the fight. "When you're done here, take Mr. Black back to the settlement, and start testing the people there." He turned to Galen. "You sure the signal will reach?"

"It's propagating very nicely through the atmosphere," Galen said. "You wouldn't know it, but there's enough virus in the air to carry the signal around the entire planet."

"So you don't need to move anything."

"No," Galen agreed smugly. "It's very convenient."

"How much longer will you need?"

Galen looked up and smiled enigmatically. "Not long."

"Great." He nodded at them. "I'm going back to the Excalibur, to find out what was shooting at us."

He sent Trace back to the surface to assist the others after they docked. Then he headed to the bridge. Anticipation was a low hum in his ears. He tried to relax.

"Captain," Morden said when he stepped onto the bridge. "Something about that ship..."

"Who let you on the bridge?" Matt asked.

Morden blinked. "I followed Max."

"Right." He took slight satisfaction in kicking John out of his chair. "What about it?"

"There was someone in it."

"What, its crew?"

"No, not like..." Morden trailed off, shook his head. He finished, softly, "Not like that..."

This was getting nowhere. Matt leaned forward and glared. "Like _what_, then?"

Morden met his glare. "The Shadows would incorporate people into the processes of their ships. Without a sentient being to be the ship's brain, the ship wouldn't function. There was someone in that ship, like _that_."

Matt could tell he was staring. After a couple seconds he closed his mouth and swallowed, hard. "The ship was using Shadow technology, then?"

"Sort of." Morden looked out the window meditatively. "But not wisely, and not well. It was broken. Different... I keep getting the feeling that I should know how to fix it, and that's..."

"Wonderful. If it wasn't the Shadows, who did it?"

"I can't tell." Morden looked back and frowned. "Which brings me to the other thing I wanted to tell you. Captain Ivanova has disappeared."

"What do you mean, disappeared?"

Morden shrugged. "Just that I tried to look up her records today to see where she's been assigned. Her records have been either moved or deleted."

Morden was very good at hiding his anxiety, but his hands were clasped together a little tighter than normal. Matt chewed his lower lip. "That can't be good."

"No. It can't."

He sighed. "Matheson, how's that retrieval coming?"

"Slowly, sir," Matheson replied. "The crew is having trouble finding pieces large enough to collect."

"Well," he said, "on the bright side, we seem to have a working cure."

That caught everyone's attention. "So the transmission works, then?" Matheson asked, anxious.

"That's what Dr. Chambers says. She's doing follow-ups right now."

A wave of relief swept over the bridge. He allowed himself to indulge in it himself, for a moment. Matheson was grinning. "That's wonderful news, sir."

"Yes. Yes it is." They could give the information to Earth Central now, along with the database and possibly Mr. Morden, and then go back to the Rim. Or maybe just retire. A few decades on a beach somewhere sounded wonderful just about now...

A comm chirp interrupted his reminiscing. He opened his eyes to greet Galen's image.

"There's nothing left for me to do here," the techno-mage commented. "So I'm coming back aboard to see if any of the bits from your opponent up there are interesting."

"Good. I'm looking forward to your input." Galen nodded, and his image vanished.

"Captain," Matheson said. "The retrieval crew has found something." He paused. "It looks like a body."

Morden didn't want to get dragged along to medlab to take a look at the autopsy, but Matt insisted. If he had a local expert on Shadow technology, he was going to get some use out of him. Morden dragged Eilerson along out of spite, and Galen met them there.

The body wasn't a pretty sight, but it was clearly human.

Morden recovered his composure pretty quickly. "Well, those aren't Shadow implants."

"Definitely not," Galen agreed.

"Ugh," Eilerson said. After wincing a bit more, he added, "It looks sort of like vicar tech."

"What?" Matt asked.

"Vicar, from VCR," Eilerson elaborated. "One of the few successes to ever come out of the cybernetics experiments of the twenties. Not many human ones around now, but you can find some firms advertising them as fair witnesses."

That wasn't reassuring. "So what you're saying is this looks human-made."

Eilerson shrugged. "Well, I can't be absolutely sure, of course."

Matt closed his eyes and tried to retreat to that beach. It wasn't happening. "Have there been any more recent brain-linked cybernetics studies?" He opened his eyes and looked meaningfully at Morden. "Earthforce Gray, perhaps?"

Morden shrugged. "If there were, I wasn't in that division."

Matt's comm chirped. Startled, he raised it. "Gideon."

"Captain, you'd better come to the bridge. A ship just opened a jump point halfway around the planet. Unknown silhouette... you're going to want to be up here."

Morden was rubbing his forehead, wincing. "Now _that_," he said, mostly to himself, "Is at least partly Shadow technology."

Not reassuring. "On my way," he said, and ran for the bridge.

* * *

The Rhinegold was giving her a headache. She was sure of it. 

An hour on the ship and there was an ache at the base of her skull. A full day and it hadn't gone away. If anything, the feeling had intensified.

As they reached the Orion sector, the ache gave way to pounding. And stabbing. She gritted her teeth and told herself it was something else--heck, even morning sickness, the thought of which nearly sent her into a panic attack until she checked her contracep implant again--but it was the ship. Something about the ship was driving her crazy.

Of course, the rest of her crew was suffering. They liked the large quarters, of course, and the luxuries that had been built in, like a few dormatory-style shower rooms with real running water, which Susan wasn't sure how the technicians pulled off, but...

The ship's AI was a problem. Calm, never demanding, only interested in following orders. Only those orders included never giving over control of Susan's ship to her, or her crew.

The headaches were the real problem, though. They blinded her.

Barely an hour before they were to reach their destination, Trevor walked into her office and shut the door. Her nice, big, open office, in which she was getting absolutely no work done despite several doses of ibumax. He tapped a command into his link and then asked, "Rhinegold, can you hear me?"

The AI stayed silent. Trevor sighed in relief. "It works. We have a few minutes where he can't hear us."

That was a major relief. "Good. Can you get control back?"

He shook his head. "This ship is deeply under AI control. There are triggers everywhere. It's designed so no enemy could ever get control away from the central processor, and the manuals don't kick in unless the AI is fully dead." He hesitated. "And I think it's rigged to blow, first. Captain, this whole situation stinks."

She nodded.

"And... what are we doing with this colony, anyway? We know Captain Gideon might have a cure. Are we going to raze this place to the ground, when there's a good chance these people, even if they are infected, could be saved?"

Slowly, working around her headache, Susan said, "Trevor... I think we've been set up."

He gaped at her. It occurred to her that even with the evidence in front of him, he didn't believe anything bad of Earthforce. Clark's people were gone, and everything was bright and shiny now, right?

She hated to be the one bringing doses of reality to her senior officer, but he'd managed to live this long without any, so the job fell to her. "Just because we got rid of the obviously nasty people in the war," she pointed out, "doesn't mean they're all gone. There was black ops stuff going on when Santiago was in power. Hell, well before. And some of them are still there, mostly because we never knew about most of them."

"So they sent us out here to... what, to die?"

"I don't know." She shook her head. She couldn't think, with this buzzing. "What I do know is I want control of this ship. Find the AI core and burn it out if you can. They thought they could pack us into this box and control us, well, they're wrong."

"Yessir." Trevor's back straightened again. He tapped another code into his link, nodded, and left.

She looked again at the reports on her desk, sighed, and leaned back, trying to shut out the burning, buzzing, tapping in the back of her mind.

_help..._

She jerked up, looking around.

No. No one was there.

It was just her imagination.

They were coming out of hyperspace, soon. She should be on the bridge.

* * *

The ship that was hanging on the horizon was like nothing Matt had ever seen. Black, but matte black, not the sick glistening of a Shadow ship. Curved, almost like a Centauri ship, but with multiple decks and a definite human sense of aesthetics. And bristling with gunports like a very honorable Minbari warship. 

"Shadow technology," Morden said, irritated, as Matt took his chair. "All through it."

Matt eyed him. "How did you get here before me?"

"I can teleport, remember?"

"They're hailing us," Matheson said.

Matt nodded. Probably nobody was more surprised than he was when Ivanova's face appeared onscreen.

"Captain Ivanova," he greeted her. "How nice to see you again so soon. Nice ship."

"Captain Gideon," she said. "Yes, they hustled me onto this command. She's a good ship. Impressive AI."

He caught something in her glance. It went beyond the worries of 'What is a warship doing here?' and 'What is Ivanova doing in another command so soon?'

This was straight to, 'I'm not in control of this situation.' And on Ivanova's face, that wasn't a pretty sight. This was a woman who had taken a handful of White Stars against Clark's fleet of Earthforce Shadow destroyers, and...

... oh, shit.

"How's the mission going?" she asked.

Careful not to betray his thoughts, he replied, "Well, the cure works. We'll be heading back to Earth, soon, to turn over all the data. Hopefully--"

The comm shut off with a screech. He cursed under his breath as Matheson reported, "They're opening fire!"

Shit. "Evasive action."

"Shall we return fire?"

"No!" Morden cried.

Matt glared at him. "No," he ordered Matheson. "Not unless we have to."

"We may have to," Galen said from behind him.

He swiveled to look at the techno-mage. "The AI," he started to ask.

"Someone in the ship... someone _is_ the ship," Morden was muttering. "But it's all broken somehow."

Matt ignored him, pressing Galen. "If it is someone implanted in the ship, can you contact them? Tell them to break it off?"

"No," Galen said.

"What, just no?"

"No." Galen shook his head. "Matthew, I've tried before. It does not work. The ship only falls further into madness."

A hit from the other ship landed. The bridge quaked. Galen kept his footing, barely.

"Sir, the Excalibur's hull isn't compensating for the energy blasts from the other ship," Matheson said. "We're taking serious damage with every hit."

"We have to destroy it," Galen said.

"There are a thousand people on that ship," Morden snapped.

"A thousand and forty," Matt said.

Reflex.

He stood, faced Morden. "You said earlier that you felt like you should be able to fix... the other ship. Can you?"

Morden looked startled. "I don't..."

"Yes or no?"

"It's never that simple." Morden grimaced. Then he looked thoughtfully at Galen. "Maybe."

"Yes?"

"With Galen's help."

Galen looked startled. "I--"

"Do it," Matt ordered.

Morden nodded, then stepped forward and offered the techno-mage his hand. Galen stared at him for a moment, then took it. In another heartbeat they had vanished.

"Sir, they're launching fighters." Matheson checked his readout again. "At least, they look like fighters."

"Life signs?" At Matheson's hesitation, "_Human_ life signs?"

"Negative."

Matt nodded grimly. "Those I want shot down."

* * *

The comm shut off, and the headache went from bad to blinding. 

"Captain, we don't have--" Trevor stared at her. "Captain?"

"Enners, you have command," she snapped. And then, as the pain kicked up another notch, "Augh!"

He looked startled, but raised his link fast. "Tanaka, get a crew to section 4 and start burning your way in."

Susan couldn't concentrate on what she was hearing. There was only the buzzing in her head. Trevor's arguments with the AI were indistinct, background noise.

_Here..._

The pain snapped off. Aaron was there, looking into her eyes, worried.

"Ouch," she said.

"I can imagine. Come on, we've got to save your ship."

She almost laughed. "The ship is the problem."

"In any case, I need your help." He turned to Trevor. "Where did you say the core is?"

"Section 4. A team's there now."

"I see," he said, but he didn't seem to be listening. "Come on."

She only now noticed Galen, standing slightly behind Morden, looking distressed about something. Then they were running, toward the lift, which got them to sector 4, and the smell of ozone and plasma.

They stopped a few feet away from where Tanaka's team had already removed large sections of bulkhead. "Are you through yet?" Morden asked.

The junior lieutenant jerked her head at the hole in the wall. "We're removing another plate. We think it's the last, but we didn't have time to do a full ultrasound."

"Holy shit!" yelled a tech from inside the wall.

Galen gestured impatiently, and the piece of steel sailed out on no visible support to stack itself alongside another against the wall. Two technicians stumbled out after it, carrying a cutting torch, eyes wide.

Susan stepped forward into the glare of work lights and stared at what had been revealed.

In the living heart of the wall were cables and wires like tentacles, wrapping and covering and digging into the flesh of the man, a human man, strung up and pulled into the wall, a part of the living, breathing machine under and inside of her ship.

A man she knew.

A Psi Corps telepath. Harriman Gray.

"Oh, my God," she whispered.

"You know him?" Galen asked.

She nodded, horrified. Aaron stepped forward, put his hand to the wall beside Harriman's head. "This isn't all Shadow tech," he said. "There's something in his brain. Some sort of psi implant." He looked up. "Galen, come here. You're going to need to take control of the ship."

"I don't think you realize the enormity of--"

"Susan," Aaron cut him off, taking her hand and pulling her a step forward. She stumbled, still staring at Harriman's face, partly obscured by wires and implants stabbing into his temples. "Susan, listen to me. I need you to break the blocks."

"What?" She stared at him. "I... no. I'm not... I can't..."

"Yes, you can." He grabbed her hand, squeezed. "You can. Look, all First Ones tech is related, right? The Shadows and the Vorlons, the jumpgates and the Great Machine on Epsilon 3... they're all related. The tech will help you. _He'll_ help you. But you have to break whatever loop they've got him in."

She shook her head, dazed. "No. You can do it, I'm not a telepath--"

"I have to keep everything together. I need you to do this. I need your help." His eyes held her. _I've never done anything like this. I don't know if I can. I don't want everyone on this ship to die._

God--his eyes were the same color as Marcus'. What a stupid thought.

"All right," she said. "I'll try. When..."

He pulled her hand forward and pressed her palm against Harriman's face. The telepath's skin was cold. Waxy. Alien. "Now--"

She fell in.

She was drifting through a cold, foggy whiteness. She must be falling, or freefalling. The mist pressed against her face, was wet along her fingers.

There was no up, except the place she was falling from. There was no down, except where she was going. There were no features, no people. Nothing.

For a moment, everything else--the battle, the ship, Trevor's panic, her headache--was a dream. This comforting, drifting sea of white, that was real. The tangible intangibility. The mist, the cold. She could close her eyes, and relax, drifting down...

Harriman Grey's face, wires and cables--

"Hello?" she called into the whiteness. "Anyone? Mr. Gray?"

No response.

"Harriman?" she tried.

Nothing.

She was still falling, slowly, nothing all around her. A haze was growing in her mind.

She didn't want to be in this mist any more. She wanted to see. She wanted to touch things. She wanted to find Harriman Gray and beat him over the head until he stopped controlling her ship. And since nobody was going to pull her out of the fog, she had to do it herself.

She closed her eyes and imagined the most solid place she knew. Babylon 5.

"It worked for Jeff," she said out loud. "And he was being tortured. It worked for him, it can work for me."

But when she opened her eyes, she was still drifting in mist.

Now she was getting angry. Concentrating, she thought of every detail she could. Her console in C&C. What it felt like to pace back and forth in front of the window. The tables in the War Room. The straight-backed chairs in the Council Chambers. Walking down the central corridor. Coriolis effects getting onto the core shuttle. Drinks at the casino. The feel of the Zocalo corridor under her feet.

The feel of the corridor under her feet.

The feel of the corridor under her feet.

She stepped forward. She was coming up on the bar. Meeting Garibaldi for drinks and eating lunch at the adjoining cafe and avoiding Talia and meeting Talia and trying to forget Talia, and the chairs and the tables just _so_...

She walked around a booth and sat down at one of the tables. The place was deserted, but it had been bustling, full of people, when Harriman had walked out and sat down across from her. She remembered.

There was a flicker, almost a presence.

She held her breath, clenched her hands together on the table._ Hello?_

Another flicker.

_Sit down with me. Have a drink._

The presence vanished, then suddenly flickered, in and out, in and out, before and behind her and beside her and finally across from her, barely more than a ghost. Gritting her teeth, she forced the image of Harriman sitting across from her, gray suit and black gloves, intense stare and failed attempts at rapport.

The presence hesitated, then suddenly there, there was Harriman Gray, sitting across from her and staring and _his eyes were black_ and his expression blank and he said "I don't remember you," and she flinched away and he was gone.

She choked back a surprised sob and said, "Harriman, come back. I want to talk to you."

And he was there, again, his black eyes with no irises somehow focusing on her. "I don't know you," he said.

She swallowed. "We met, here," she said.

No response. God, she remembered eyes like that, on Lyta, at Z'Ha'dum.

"You were working for Colonel Ari Ben Zayn. For Earthforce Eyes. IA. You'd been ordered to scan the command staff, to check our loyalty."

His brow furrowed, slightly. But all he said was, "I am loyal."

"You took Commander Sinclair's side. Because he was right."

"Loyal..." Harriman whispered again.

She reached out for his gloved hands with her bare ones. "Sometimes it's more important to be right than to be loyal."

She took his hands...

_Psi-Corps loyalty tests are nothing like Earthforce ones. They're telepaths. They don't need to ask questions. They're telepaths. They know if you're lying. They're telepaths. They protect their own. They can scan you. And scan you. And scan you. And--_

She scrambled to get his gloves off and she might have torn his skin with her nails and he was bleeding and she had to think of something to distract him with and she grabbed his hands and squeezed and shouted "You wanted to be a pilot, Harriman, remember? Well this is what it's like--"

And she _remembered_, as hard as she could, all the sensations that she could, flying a Starfury, jumping in and out of hyperspace, dodging fire, the thrill, the terror, nearly crashing and hitting the eject just in time, all the intensity and yearning she could feel, and something stirred, and something railed against the loop that the endless deep scans had forced him into, and when she had exhausted herself with the memories he opened his eyes again and stared at her, startled. And this time the blackness was gone.

"Commander Iv--" he shook his head, corrected himself. "Captain Ivanova. Where... where am I?" He looked around, down at their hands, where she was still holding his tightly enough to cramp.

She was suddenly reluctant to let go. "You're in my ship," she said.

He stared at her hands as she relaxed, pulled back, worked her fingers as the tingling started. "You're a telepath," he said wonderingly. "I never guessed."

She nodded.

"I didn't..." he started to say, then stared at her, openmouthed, and reached for her hand, but he was already fading, losing corporeality. "I can't see anything--"

She tried to grab his fingers, but he was gone. She knocked over her chair in her haste to stand, but the illusion of Babylon 5 was crumbling around her, leaving only darkness--

--but for a moment, through that darkness, she could see _everything--_

Her eyes were stinging. She blinked several times and drew back her hand to wipe sweat away, and wondered how long she'd been standing there staring, with her eyes open.

"We've stopped firing," Galen said. She looked over. He was leaning against the wall, white with strain.

She tried speaking, and after a second croaked, "Did it work?"

"Yes," Aaron said.

She turned to face him. He was leaning back against the mass of cables and wires, staring into space, a mixture of confusion and wonder on his face.

Galen cleared his throat and levered himself to his feet. Aaron looked over at him. "What," the techno-mage asked, "Did you do, exactly?"

Aaron thought it over for a moment, then smiled slightly. "I built a starship."

* * *

Matt didn't expect Morden to come back with Captain Ivanova in tow, but he did, supporting her much more than was usually expected of even a starship captain's lover. Galen was moving on his own power, thought Matt noticed the techno-mage's movements were slower, more deliberate than normal. 

Ivanova looked up and cleared her throat. "We need a conference."

He put Matheson in charge and ushered them back to the conference room. Ivanova collapsed into her chair. Morden didn't look in the least affected, but obviously found it a relief to sit down.

Eilerson followed them in and glared at Morden. "What the hell happened over there?"

Morden looked at Ivanova. She raised her link. "Harriman?"

The screen on the wall switched itself on. Matt turned, startled. On screen was a man he didn't know, late thirties, with dark brown hair, wearing a suit and leather gloves. There was a Psi-Corps pin on his lapel. The man smiled. "Hi, I don't think we've been introduced. I'm Harriman Gray."

Matt frowned. "I'm Captain Gideon. You're... Psi Corps?" He tried to make out where the man was calling from. It was a fairly generic office. No windows, nothing on the walls.

"Oh, heh..." Gray looked down at the pin, then covered it with his hand. When he pulled his hand away the pin was gone, a nice bit of sleight of hand. "I'm sorry. I mean, they told me it's all gone, of course, but the habit's hard to break."

Something was fishy here. "Just where are you calling from, Mr. Gray?"

"Oh. Um." Gray nodded, slightly embarrassed. "I'm that ship out there, Captain Gideon."

Matt felt as though the Excalibur had dropped several hundred yards without him. "Sorry?"

"The, uh, EAS Rhinegold." Gray grinned suddenly. "Which is amusing, of course, if you've read the original Eddas--"

"I'm familiar with the Ring cycle." He shook his head. This was too much. "You're actually, uh..."

Gray nodded.

"There have been a run of black projects going through Earthforce, combining Shadow technology with earlier cybernetic experiments," Ivanova said, voice raw. "They combined what they'd learned from their earlier failures with Shadow ships--"

"Including the ship in the Lanep system which destroyed the Cerberus," Galen said.

"And the dormant ship they found under Ganymede," Ivanova continued. "And they had successes, too, with the fleet of hybrids that Clark had built... but they weren't as good as Shadow ships. Without direction, Shadow technology doesn't work right."

Eilerson made an incredulous noise. "So they just kept trying to put people in these ships?"

Ivanova nodded. "But they needed to control them. And you don't get too many volunteers for that sort of business."

"They've been known to exist," Matt grumbled, thinking about the colonists on Theta 49 below, who had all been volunteers before being shot in the back.

"Not," Morden said, "for the kind of experiments that were necessary to turn someone into a ship's CPU."

"Nine years ago," Ivanova continued, "we saw the results of something called the Lazarus project. Taking people at the edge of violent death and forcing them into reliving that moment, while wiring the rest of them up to take orders like a computer. They used that technology to improve their hybrid Shadow ships."

"So what did you do?" Matt asked.

It was Gray who answered. "They broke the programming. They put me in control."

"But they didn't get you out."

Gray frowned thoughtfully, then shrugged. "I'm strangely comfortable with that, actually. This has its benefits." He smiled shyly. "I always wanted to be a pilot."

"Harriman is not the last of these ships, unfortunately," Galen said. "Earthforce has been busy lately constructing them."

"Damn it." Matt's anger flared. "We have to do something."

"We will," Morden said. Then he looked at Galen.

Galen stared back. "You can't be serious."

"Come on, Galen," Morden said, grinning. "Haven't you ever wanted to change the universe?"

Matt felt as though he were swiftly being run-around. "Wait a minute..."

Morden turned to the screen. "I'll need your help too," he told Gray.

"Of course," the telepath answered, surprised.

"_Wait_ a minute," Matt said. Morden looked at him. "Just what are you going to do?"

Morden gave him a level stare. "Wake them all up. Fix all the broken Shadow technology. Do for the rest of them what I did for Mr. Gray here."

Matt stared. "I don't know if you noticed, but whatever you did seems to have nearly killed Galen and Captain Ivanova."

"That's because I didn't know what I was doing, and they had to do a lot of the work. But it's clear now. I can see it."

Matt considered for a few moments. Then he looked to Galen. The techno-mage was staring at Morden thoughtfully, with a grudging respect.

"Can you do it?" Matt asked.

Galen looked up. "Possibly," he said. "And... it would be criminal not to try."

"All right," Matt said. "I don't know exactly what you're doing, or what's going to happen... but do it. And come back alive."

Morden nodded. Then he gestured, slightly, and both he and Galen vanished.

The screen shut off. Ivanova sighed and put her head in her hands.

"What's the worst that could happen?" he asked.

"They alert Earthforce to our plans and location and we get wiped out by a fleet of semiconscious Shadow ships crewed by innocent victims we can't attack," she muttered.

"You've had practice at coming up with this sort of scenario."

"I'm Russian. We're the ones with a sense of perspective."

* * *

Building a starship and becoming one are two different things. Morden reached out his hand and took hold of the connection, and for a final instant allowed himself to worry what would happen if things went wrong. 

Then he closed his eyes and the world dropped out beneath him.

Understanding was like a gale-force updraft as he opened his eyes and opened his eyes and the universe spread out beneath him in a web of ever-changing ever-breathing gossamer seafoam strong as steel and filled with life, life, life! Oh, God, he could see!

He flexed his fingers and the tingle of the sensors of the Rhinegold echoed back. The planet below hissed and purred with the static crackle of movement and growth and change and if he squinted he could count every hair on Dureena Nafeel's head.

He dropped the sensors of the ship and touched the harpstrings of the galaxy; they played back the songs of every star, the blue-and-redshift allegro of the spiral arms, the susurrus of solar winds, the high bells of supernovas and the bass thrumms of spinning neutron stars. And there! Up and beyond, past the globe around M32, past the brilliance of a hundred thousand galaxies, to the beating heart of the universe, to the curtains of hyperspace and the dimmest brush of the photinos themselves.

He could see... everything.

"Wow," Galen whispered beside him.

"Yes," Harriman answered.

Their voices brought him back, here, the task at hand. "Let's show the rest what they're missing," he muttered, and turned his gaze on Sol.

They could all see the docks, hidden behind Venus; the ships built there already holding their captives. Harriman distracted their minds. Galen pressed the right places on the ships. Morden reached, and with a gentle thought, reconnected their souls.

While he was at it, he taught Galen how to teleport.

Galen. He batted aside the techno-mage's objections and pulled the location of the hideout from Galen's catalogue of numbers. With a thought, he was in their system, casting out the final traces of the Shadows--

It wasn't programming! He laughed at his own translation. Not programming, not a machine, not anything he could explain; it was organic, and alive, and the Shadows had told the tech to fight back, but that could be bypassed just for the asking. And it was working with him, finally, fully, and he could almost see the fire in his veins, fire that would let him light a torch to burn holes in the universe--

--and then was gone, before they could detect him. Then Harriman closed the connection, and for all that fire, it was as though all the stars had been hidden and the torches of all knowledge put out. Like being blind. Like not having a starship. Like barely having a soul.

Back to being only human. He opened his eyes and Galen was staring at him, amazed. "I see..." the techno-mage said.

"Did you do it?"

They were on the Excalibur again; he had taken them back without thinking. Blinking, he looked around the conference room. They'd left only minutes ago, but it felt like centuries.

Galen answered for the both of them. "Yes. And I believe that Earthforce's nastier bureaus will have plenty to think about with their entire fleet gaining independence and possibly going public with this information."

"Ha," Gideon said. "Good. Let them deal with the consequences for once."

He wasn't listening. He looked down at Susan, who was still sitting with her head in her hands. "Are you all right?" he asked softly.

She looked up, then stood and faced him. "Are you?"

He couldn't quite answer that one.

She narrowed her eyes. "You aren't going to transcend humanity and vanish off to the Rim or something, now that you've saved the universe?"

Ah.

He took a deep breath and let the last of the starship wash away. Human. Only human, but... he was remembering, now, all the best things about being only human.

"No," he promised. "No, I'm staying here." He smiled, suddenly...

Happy?

Hell, sure. Why not. Give yourself permission, Aaron, nobody else can.

He smiled, and she smiled back. "This is where the future is all happening," he said. "I'm not leaving until it's here."


	4. Epilogues I and II

Epilogue I.

It was, Delenn admitted, possibly egotistical of her to make her final stand on recorded human television. But some things needed to be said, and this was the last chance she would have to say them.

In the sunlight outside she sighed, silently, to herself. Her people flanked her, waiting for her orders to return to her ship, to the comforts of her seclusion: music, Shal Mayan's tee'la, quiet conversation with the aspiring acolytes who followed her. She had not asked to be followed, but she enjoyed the company, the insight.

Though at times, she missed... those she had known. Lennier. David.

John.

She fought down tears. She had known that history--that impartial, all-knowing force of history that poor woman in the studio worshiped--would do with him as it would, but it still hurt and angered her to see men and women who had never known a moral choice more complicated than a request to donate to charity making decisions about what should and should not be recorded about their struggle.

With a sigh, she opened her eyes.

The man who stood in front of her was familiar--sharply familiar. He inclined his head gently toward the studio behind her and said, "I saw the broadcast and thought I'd come say hello."

She knew that voice. She couldn't help but smile, a bit perplexed. "It has been a while. You haven't changed."

"You grow more radiant every year."

Now that was pure flattery and they both knew it. "Only because I am crowned with more white. Or less. I suppose I am returning to my natural state."

He grinned and offered her his arm. "Walk with me?"

This would have been unthinkable, years ago. But then, she had done many unthinkable things, in her time. And certainly the woman who broke and later reformed the Gray Council, who helped forge the Interstellar Alliance and drive out the First Ones, shouldn't be afraid to walk with a former minion of the Shadows.

It had been a long time, after all.

She took his offered arm, and they stepped forward into the garden. "It is pleasant," she said, "To see so many green spaces in the city."

"This place used to be called 'The Garden State.'"

"Oh?"

"I grew up around here." Another smile. "A long time ago."

"Ah." She looked around. The buildings were visible at the edges of the skyline, but they were all fronted by well-kept lawns, trees, pathways. "Has it changed much, since then?"

"It's unrecognizable. But that's progress."

"Minbar has not changed so much, I think," she said. "But it feels strange, to walk the paths in Tuzanor, with all who I knew gone."

He nodded, slowly. "Yes... yes. I know that feeling."

They passed through a grove of trees in silence, winding their way to a lake framed in mist. He didn't press her for speed, or for conversation.

"I was surprised," she said, "when Susan told me about you."

That made him chuckle. "I can imagine."

"I did not see you at her funeral."

He stopped laughing. "Funerals aren't good for me. I needed some time alone."

"Ah." She nodded. The mist was even thicker down by the lake than she had thought. Or perhaps that was just her eyes. Her eyesight had always been good, but even that had started failing her, these last few years. The dampness wasn't causing its familiar pain in her wrists and ankles, though, for which she was thankful.

"And you are helping the Rangers?"

He nodded. "There are still a few unresearched First Ones colonies out there. I'm hoping there's more intact technology somewhere. The database's descriptions seem utterly opaque to everyone except me, and I'm no engineer."

They turned back into the trees. The path was paved, for which she was grateful. The amount of moisture in the air would have turned an unpaved road quickly to mud.

"Morden," she asked, a sudden thought occurring to her.

He looked up, expectant.

"Have you ever forgiven yourself, for what you did while working for the Shadows?"

His eyes darkened and he looked away. She sighed.

"I don't know if you know this, but I was admitted to the Gray Council before the war with your people." She smiled, bitterly. "Just before, in fact. The encounter with the Prometheus interrupted the end of my initiation ceremony."

He nodded. She hesitated at the next, surprised at how hard it was to say, even after all the years. "What you may not know about my time in the Gray Council is that I had been apprenticed to Dukhat himself. He was a mentor to me. A friend... a father, in many ways, when I was separated from my family." She swallowed, hard. "When he died..."

"Delenn..."

"When he died, the Council was divided, leaderless. Half voted for reason, for mercy, to wait. The other half voted for punishment, for war." She could still not look up. "I was the deciding vote."

He said nothing. She pulled her hand away and rubbed her shoulders, suddenly cold.

"I understand," he said.

She looked at him. He was watching her, expression neutral. "It isn't my place to forgive, either," he continued.

She nodded.

"Come on." He took her arm again. "We're almost there."

They were enshrouded by fog. The trees were an indistinct blur around them. "Where are we?"

"This way." He urged her faster. She was having to walk much quicker than she had in decades, but she wasn't tiring. The ground sloped upwards, steeply, and his pace never slackened--and despite her worries, neither did hers.

Without warning they were breaking free of the fog, and running--running through cool sand, down a slope, toward a beach. The waves roared in her ears, the sand sank beneath her feet, and the stars! The stars stretched overhead in a blaze of glory, constellations she had never seen nor imagined. She threw down her staff and ran into the water's edge, giddy, splashing at the waves, glorying in the starlight. She felt young.

Startled, she looked at her hands. She _was_ young.

How... She looked for Morden, frantic, but he was gone. His footprints traced a path for a while, then disappeared, melted into the water. There was no one else on the beach.

No... there was someone else on the beach.

She walked out of the waves toward him, her breath catching in her throat. He was walking toward her, his movement hesitant, anxious.

Even when her eyes told her, she could not believe it. It wasn't until he cried, "Delenn!" and swept her into his arms again and kissed her that she could believe, really believe, that it was John, that he was here, that he was real.

He brushed her tears away with his fingers, gently, and stared at her as though he had never seen anything more precious. "How did you..."

"I..." She looked one more time back from where they had come. The beach was still empty. "I'm not entirely sure. I walked here... with Mr. Morden..."

John looked puzzled for a moment, then grinned and held her tighter. "Come with me," he said. "I have to show you the city... I have to show you everything."

But he didn't move, and neither did she. After a minute he said, "I've missed you so much."

She smiled, and nestled her head in the crook of his neck so he wouldn't see her tears. "I know, John. I love you."

"I love you, too," he said.

Some time later, he said, "Look... over the water. The sun is coming up."

* * *

Epilogue II.

He could do nothing but stare at the devastation.

The half-human, half-Minbari pilot beside him sighed. "By the time we heard anything was happening, it was too late to stop it," he said. "The Outer Confederates claim they acted in premature self-defense, which is true if that message we received is true, but..."

"I leave you people alone for five minutes," Aaron muttered, "And you go and let Earth get blown up."

The pilot coughed. "That's a little unfair..."

"So is Geneva turning into a glass crater."

He shouldn't blame the pilot. Or the Anla'shok, who had given him this tour guide and passage on this ship. Though technically, he didn't need a ship to get anywhere.

"All right. I've seen enough."

The pilot--Aaron didn't even know the kid's name--nodded and turned the ship around, back into hyperspace. Aaron sighed and leaned back in his seat.

He wanted to pitch a fit and rend things. He wanted to make things explode. But he wasn't going to lose his composure in front of this Ranger, he was going to get good and mad and lose his composure in front of someone who really deserved it.

Like, say, Lorien.

The Younger Races had come pretty damn far in five hundred years. If the First Ones came back and wanted a rumble, Aaron was pretty sure that the current generation could give them a run for their money, if not outright win. So this continued policy of noninterference seemed... childish. Especially when a few wiser heads or an outright admission of The Larger Problem--which most people still didn't believe, even within the Anla'shok--would have probably precluded this whole catastrophe.

Earth was now covered in scorch marks. Dammit, they should have been able to do something!

He fumed all the way back to Lower Minbar Orbit, where the docks and his current apartments were located. He went home, closed the door, gave his old Soul Hunter sphere a pat.

Then he closed his eyes and _reached_--

He'd cheated, the last time he went to the song called the House of Light and Turquoise, by pretending that he was a Vorlon ship and had passage. This time he was stopped at the gate. He landed in a null-space, floating, an angry twisting shape of energy floating before him.

"The prodigal son returns," the Vorlon said.

"Hello, Whandall."

"You've been rather busy in this region of space, lately."

He made an aggrieved noise in his throat. "_Once_, Whandall. And it was _four hundred years ago_."

"And you think it's given you a right to come and go as you please, transporting whomever you like?"

"It was a nice thing to do for an old friend. Whandall, my planet just got blown up."

"You have my sympathy."

"Whandall!"

"But only that." The Vorlon floated closer. "You run to us when you hurt--we are elder races, not your parents. You do not need us to lay down the law. You need to learn without us to stop playing with matches."

"Is that what you told yourselves when the Ikaraans drove themselves to extinction?"

"Yes. It is." Whandall's colors changed slightly. "You win a point in this argument for not bringing up the War."

"Great. I win a point for not pointing out how you lied to us and killed us by the million to get your point across."

"You do not understand."

"Oh, I understand," he growled. "I understand that despite the Younger Races being your one big hope, you're perfectly content to have us slaughter each other, as long as _some_ of us stay alive to save your asses when the supernovas start. The rest of us killing each other isn't a concern as long as it furthers _your_ interests, because it's not as though we're individually smart enough to make a difference, is it?"

"You do _not_ understand."

"Then enlighten me!" He crossed his arms. "Give me some answers. Or are the Vorlons still only good at looking mysterious and bullshitting?"

"Now that," said a new voice, "is being more than a little unfair."

He spun to face Lorien, who was standing behind him, regarding him with a disapproving expression. The ground was suddenly solid under his feet, and he took the opportunity to brace himself.

Lorien shook his head slowly. "Don't think that we don't yearn to save your races from all their errors. But there is no growth without pain. There is no success without suffering."

"Suffering," Aaron said, clipping off his syllables, "doesn't quite cover Earth's biosphere being reduced to hardy species of algae and a few million sentients in bunkers with shotguns."

"Earth will rebuild itself."

"And meanwhile eight billion people have gone up in smoke!" He looked, he searched, but he couldn't see any feeling in Lorien's gold eyes. "Doesn't that mean anything to you?"

Lorien slowly held out his hand.

Aaron looked down. Glittering on Lorien's palm was a sphere of orbiting lights, small blue specks that swirled and pulsed in a seamless ballet. "What is it?"

"An access point." Something in Lorien's voice made him look up again. "You will not have much time, for it is difficult to keep the link open. But perhaps you will find some of the answers you seek."

He hesitated for a moment more, then thrust his hand into the link and connected--

--from one black place to another. Lorien and Whandall were gone. He was alone.

A door opened and shut behind him. He turned, but he didn't see a door, or a doorway; just a featureless black expanse and--

her...

"My God," he whispered. "Rebecca?"

And she smiled, relief, and then his wife was in his arms and he was kissing her--she was kissing him--and oh, God!

"Oh, Aaron," she murmured into his shoulder after a time.

He couldn't speak. After several tries, he managed to ask, "How?"

She sniffed and pulled back just far enough to see him. "This is what they've been building. The... the First Ones, the Soul Hunters. All this."

"All what?" He looked around, but could only see blackness. "I can't..."

"No, we're in something special. It's all one giant... like a giant computer. We're in an access point." She smiled. "I got special permission to see you... oh, God, Aaron. I've missed you so much."

"What have they built?"

"Well..." She shrugged. "Have you ever wondered if there's a Heaven?"

He stared at her. She smiled again and reached up to brush at his cheeks. "It's all right," she said. "Really, it's all right. It'll all be all right."

"But I can't stay with you?"

Her expression crumbled and she shook her head. "No," she said. "You have work to do."

"But I..."

"It's all right." She tried to smile again, glitter of tears haloing her eyes. "I'll be here... we'll all be here."

"Rebecca," he begged, taking her hands, feeling a tugging at the back of his mind. "Tell me... when you were trapped in hyperspace, the Leander..."

"Did the Shadows lie?"

He nodded.

"It was one long moment..." She lay her hand on his face. "We were trapped, I remember that. And we couldn't move... but I don't remember any pain."

"Becca..."

"I love you, Aaron... D'Vech creor chol, remember? But sometimes we have to wait for the border to be removed." She smiled again through her tears. "I love you."

"God, Becca!" He hadn't called her that since God he hadn't seen her in and she was fading away and he could still taste that damn perfume she always and oh God...

He sank to his knees on that black, featureless expanse. Eventually, he stopped trying to see her in the distance and covered his face with his hands.

"Did you truly believe we would let you fall?"

Aaron looked up, unwilling to stand. "Yes," he said weakly. "Yes, I believed that. You didn't give a damn--"

Lorien knelt beside him. "Of course we cared. Listen." Lorien reached out, gently touched his face. "You are our children, your races. Our hopes and dreams, our plans for the future, our future itself. You are not alone. You are not neglected. And we would never throw you into an abyss of our own making."

"I could only see the war." He glared accusingly into Lorien's mild golden eyes. "That's all there was!"

"No." Lorien shook his head. "No. There is always life."

After a time, he looked away. "How long have you..."

"A long time. Millions of years."

"Is everyone who ever..."

"No." Lorien sighed. "We do not know what truly lies beyond death, any more than you. The Soul Hunters believe nothing. The Minbari believe rebirth. We cannot arbitrate. We can only offer a choice. No one truly needs to die, not any more."

"And can people ever... come back?"

"Not fully, no." Lorien smiled. "But as you already may know, with enough effort, a being composed of nothing but energy may... influence the material world."

For a moment he didn't know what Lorien was talking about. Then it hit him. "_Falanistal_... poltergeist?"

Lorien closed his eyes and nodded.

He didn't know what to say. He stared until Lorien smiled again and stood, then offered a hand up. He took it, found himself on his feet under a ceiling of countless stars. Out in the distance, too far for the eyes to really make out, moving specks like swarms of fish darted and rolled, starships at play, exulting in the joy of movement.

"What will you do now?"

"I don't know." His voice was raw. He looked up at Lorien and shrugged. "I can't stay here, still. I mean, especially now... Earth will need help rebuilding."

"Is that what you truly want?"

His breath was catching. "No. No, I... Seeing her... I want to see her. I love her. I never really..." He had to close his eyes for a second. Everything was reeling.

"But she's right," he finally admitted. "I have work to do. She always was smarter than me."

"Will you tell anyone what you have learned?"

He laughed sardonically, startled, then grinned at Lorien's expression. "Come on. The last Jewish boy who came home with tales of a life hereafter got nailed to a tree."

Lorien smiled. "You no longer need permission to arrive and depart... though I think you've learned that already. But there was one question you never got an answer to, and I thought I would indulge your curiosity."

"Which one is that?"

"Why you."

Aaron started. "I... okay." He frowned. "Why me?"

"You have a talent, Mr. Morden, for finding the right people." Lorien nodded at his surprise. "You demonstrated it while working for the Shadows, and proved it while working to stop the Drakh plague and Earthforce's abuses. Whether by synchronicity or luck, you are a nexus. You find the correct people for the task at hand, and you bring them to the right place for change to occur."

He shook his head. "But I don't do anything special."

"Nevertheless." Lorien turned to look out at the stars. "You see them, out there?"

Swimming flecks of gold on the infinite. "Yes."

They watched in silence for a while. Then Lorien murmured, "That we could all follow, and live for the moment."

He looked up, startled. Lorien watched the ships for a moment more, then turned back to him. "Do you understand?"

Aaron shook his head. "I don't."

Lorien smiled. "Good." He turned away. "That is a good beginning."

"And what about the ending?" Aaron couldn't help asking.

Lorien was going, fading away. As through through a long tunnel he heard, "Perhaps that remains unwritten..."

He waited but heard nothing more. When he was sure he was alone, he turned from the spreading stars and walked toward Tuzanor, leaving the starships to sing amongst themselves.

-- FIN --

Comments welcome at aris at sandwich dot net.

--

THOMASINA: But instead, the Egyptian noodle made carnal embrace with the enemy who burned the great library of Alexandria without so much as a fine for all that is overdue. Oh, Septimus! -- can you bear it? All the lost plays of the Athenians! Two hundred at least by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides -- thousands of poems -- Aristotle's own library brought to Egypt by the noodle's ancestors! How can we sleep for grief?

SEPTIMUS: By counting our stock. Seven plays from Aeschylus, seven from Sophocles, nineteen from Euripides, my lady! You should no more grieve for the rest than for a buckle lost from your first shoe, or for your lesson book which will be lost when you are old. We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language.

- Tom Stoppard, Arcadia


End file.
